"Mean anything to me!" she exclaimed passionately as her eyes widened and her whole attitude relaxed into a posture of collapse in her chair. "Mean anything--!" Then suddenly she straightened up and passed a hand across her brow as though to brush away a cloud that rested there. In a composed voice she added: "It means so much that you must do as I say, not merely until you feel like disobeying again, but always." After a long silence she rose. "I must get up early," she said, remembering that tomorrow brought its program of a train journey, a matinee and an evening performance. "Paul," said Marcia as they walked back, "I have to leave a call for seven and catch a train at eight-thirty. There's no use in your getting up. No, please don't, and please don't hunt me out again." At the door of the hotel she said enigmatically, "What a wonderful balance Nature might have struck between your brother's strength and your--winning personality. Good-night." * * * * * The Duke de Metuan's failure to rehabilitate his impaired fortunes with Burton gold had left a more durable scar upon his optimism than any of the similar scars of the past. Mary Burton had been such a splendid combination of charm and opulence that a marriage with her would have made a pleasure of necessity. The Duke in his earlier stages of disappointment had felt first the pangs of a lover, and only in secondary degree the chagrin of a depleted exchequer. Several months had found him inconsolable, and when desperation had closed upon him he had wedded an estimable lady whose wealth was less dazzling than Mary's, but ample none the less. Her personal paucity of allurement was a handicap which his philosophy ignored as much as possible. In private he sometimes made a fastidious grimace, and accepted the inevitable. Yet the duke had long been an epicure in life's pleasures, and though he must yield to the demands of his creditors, much as a young prince must yield to the edicts of his chancellery in making a required marriage, he did so with mental reservations. He had no intention of permitting that necessity to cast a perpetual cloud over his days and nights. He had found it possible to leave his estate in Andalusia, where his duchess elected to remain with an imaginary malady from which she derived much melancholy pleasure, and in Nice he had been overjoyed to meet a charming acquaintance in the person of Loraine Haswell. Loraine, too, was willing to have these hours which hung heavy alleviated with companionship, and Nice is a place where hours lend themselves to the process of being lightened.