“You have been lucky in your world,” she said. “The clients of the Villa Iris are not so generous. They will make a claim out of anything, as, by the way, most men will, if the claim may get them what they want. So that little one, since she will give herself to none of them, is wise to starve. You are the only one from whom she has taken food. It is curious, eh? It is because of that and because you treat me like a human being that I, Henriette, who like the little fool, ramble on so seriously to you to-night.”

The plastered face softened into tenderness and the bird-like eyes shone and filled suddenly with tears.

“It is kind of you,” said Paul. If any one had said to him a couple of hours before that he would have felt himself intensely privileged because a little dancing girl of the Villa Iris had taken supper from him and from him alone, he would have laughed his informant to scorn. But it was so. Paul was radiant with pride. He saw himself as a very fine fellow, a much finer fellow than he had ever believed himself to be. The loneliness of his boyhood, a sudden blow crushing his pride and his dreams in the dust, and years thereafter informed with a strong purpose to regain his name and his place in his own country, had combined to defer but had not slain his youth. It was back with him now, all the more ardent and dangerous from the restraint which had held it in check. Paul Ravenel was a boy of nineteen on this evening in the fire of his passion, but with the will and the experience of his own years; and he was old enough to hide any plans which he might be forming and to seek all the knowledge he could get from Henriette.

“Why should she blow out her brains, as you say?” he asked, offering to Henriette a cigarette.

“Because that is what she will do,” replied Henriette as she lighted her cigarette. “I know my world. Listen! My father kept a little eating-house at Rouen, where I saw many types of men. He went bankrupt. I went to dance in Paris. Oh, I was nothing out of the way. I danced in a quadrille at the Casino de Paris for a little time, then at the Bal Tabarin. I went to Madrid and Barcelona where I danced at the Lion d’Or, the restaurant which has no doors, for it is open night and day. And in the end I came here. Well, I tell you this. Fine dreams are for rich people. For us, if we are wise, we bury them out of sight the moment they are born. We will not think of them. We will not allow them. The rich have much which makes disappointment bearable. For us—we blow our brains out.”

Whilst she spoke she kept darting little 

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