Three days he had ridden into the country with her, or played tennis, or driven down to the village and inspected the yacht. He had been lonely so long and this beautiful girl was such a good comrade. One moment he blessed the prospective treasure hunt, another he execrated it. To be with this girl was to love her; and whither this pleasurable idleness would lead him he was neither blind nor self-deceiving. But with the semi-humorous recklessness which was the leaven of his success, he thrust prudence behind him and stuck to the primrose path. He had played with fire before, but never had the coals burned so brightly. He did not say that she was above him; mentally and by birth they were equals; simply, he was compelled to admit of the truth that she was beyond him. Money. That was the obstacle. For what man will live on his wife's bounty? Suppose they found the treasure (and with his old journalistic suspicion he was still skeptical), and divided it; why, the interest on his share would not pay for her dresses. To the ordinary male eye her gowns looked inexpensive, but to him who had picked up odd bits of information not usually in the pathway of man, to him there was no secret about it. That bodice and those sleeves of old Venetian point would have eaten up the gains of any three of his most prosperous months. And Breitmann, dropping occasionally the ash of his cigarette on the tray, he, too, was pondering. But his German strain did not make it so easy for him as for Fitzgerald to give concrete form to his thought. The star, as he saw it, had a nebulous appearance. M. Ferraud chatted gaily. Usually a man who holds his audience is of single purpose. The little Frenchman had two aims: one, to keep the conversation on subjects of his own selection, and the other, to study without being observed. Among one of his own tales (butterflies) he told of a chase he once had made in the mountains of the Moors, in Abyssinia. To illustrate it he took up one of the nets standing in the corner. In his excitable way he was a very good actor. And when he swooped down the net to demonstrate the end of the story, it caught on a button on Breitmann's coat. "Pardon!" said M. Ferraud, with a blithe laugh. "The butterfly I was describing was not so big." Breitmann freed himself amid general laughter. And with Laura's rising the little after-dinner party became disorganized. It was yet early; but perhaps she had some thought she wished to be alone with. This consideration was the veriest bud in growth; still, it was such that she desired the seclusion of her room. She swung across her shoulders the sleepy Angora and wished the men good night.