"Good-night, Miss Paget," said Gustave gravely, but with by no means the despondent tone of a hopeless lover; "I--well, I shall see you again, perhaps, before I go to Normandy. I doubt if I shall go to-morrow. I have my own reasons for staying--unreasonable reasons, perhaps, but I shall stay." All this was said in a tone too low to reach Captain Paget's ear. "Are you going to leave us, Lenoble?" he asked in a quavering voice. "You will not stop and let Di give you a cup of tea as usual?" "Not to-night, Captain. Good-bye." He wrung the old man's hand and departed. Captain Paget dropped heavily into a chair, and for some minutes there was silence. Diana was the first to speak. "I am glad your doctor considered you well enough to go out for a drive, papa," she said. "Indeed, my dear," answered her father with a groan; "I hope my next drive may be in a different kind of vehicle--the last journey I shall ever take, until they cart away my bones for manure. I believe they do make manure from the bones of paupers in our utilitarian age." "Papa, how can you talk so horribly! You are better, are you not? M. Lenoble said you were better." "Yes, I am better, God help me!" answered the old man, too weak alike in mind and body to hide the passion that possessed, him. "That is one of the contradictions of the long farce we call life. If I had been a rich man, with a circle of anxious relations and all the noted men of Savile Row dancing attendance round my bed, I dare say I should have died; but as I happen to be a penniless castaway, with only a lodging-house drudge and a half-starved apothecary to take care of me, and with nothing before me but a workhouse, I live. It is all very well for a man to take things easily when he is ill and helpless, too weak even to think. _That_ is not the trying time. The real trial arrives when a little strength comes back to him, and his landlady begins to worry him for her rent, and the lodging-house drudge gets tired of pitying him, and the apothecary sends in his bill, and the wretched high-road lies bare and broad before him, and he hears the old order to move on. The moving-on time has come for me, Di; and the Lord alone knows how little I know where I am to go." "Papa, you are not friendless; even I can give you a little help." "Yes," answered the Captain with a bitter laugh; "a sovereign once a quarter--the scrapings of your pittance! That help won't save me from the workhouse." "There is M. Lenoble."