“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though--look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let us talk of something else. Of you!” “Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....” “Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!” “Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!” “Bravo, bravo!” “So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.” “What, you feel it beating!” “Perhaps. A little.” “Oh!” “At being in Paris, Duke.” “I deserved the snub. Go on, please.” “My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of my dreams. When I was a girl I had--oh, such dreams!” “Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use the sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh, I know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents that befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been, Miss Lamb dear, most utterly married.” “I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!” “Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she certainly was born to be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never let me forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her birth.” “But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no! My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!” The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the _concierge’s_ wife talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the anguish of ravished countries--the miraculous art of men to worship their own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried: “Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!” The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make me think of all that is impossible.”