In this laugh, however, M. Châtelard’s acumen was pleased to discover a concentrated bitterness; in the touch upon his arm, a menace to the interferer. "Nay, heaven forfend!" he cried, dropping the personal tone with a hasty return to natural good-breeding. "It only struck me, sir, that your programme was a little dangerous. And for one like myself, who has made a study of women, Lady Gerardine is a type—a type rare, fortunately, perhaps, for the peace of the world, but, heavens, of what palpitating allurement when one does come across it!" "A type of a very selfish woman," said Bethune, shortly. And this time the physician was not far wrong in noting bitterness in his tone. "As cold as a stone, I should say, and as self-centred as a cat." "Self-centred, I grant you. But cold?" screamed the Frenchman. "As cold at heart as she is white in face," said Harry English’s comrade. "White? so is the flame at its intensest! Cold? With that glow in her hair? With that look in the eyes—those lips? Touch that coldness and you will burn to the bone. Ah, it is not the old husband that will feel that fire! But the fire is there, all the fiercer for being concentrated. Ah, when she lets herself go, her Excellency, it will be terrible—it will be grand! There are conflagrations which make the very skies grow red." "My way branches off here," interrupted Bethune, drily, "and yonder are the lights of your hotel. Good night." He shook hands loosely, and was gone before the globe-trotter, interrupted in full eloquence, had had time to lay hold of his formal French manner for the farewell ceremony. "I have pressed him a little too closely," he thought, as he stood watching the soldierly figure swing away from light to darkness, down the narrow street dotted with gaudy booths. "He is already on the fatal slope.... I must not let the end of this drama escape me." Raymond Bethune, as he strode along, laughed to himself at "the French Johnny’s" nonsense. Nevertheless a phrase or two seemed to circle in his mind round the baffling image of his friend’s widow like a flight of birds round the head of a sphinx: "White? so is the flame at its intensest. Cold? Touch that coldness and be burned to the bone...." *CHAPTER VI* The walls of Lady Gerardine’s room glowed like the page of an old missal, with carmine and cobalt blue, with beetle-wing purples and greens. It was a columned and arched apartment in the wing of the modernised palace which yet remained as the last dusky prince had left it. Here Sir Arthur’s improving hand had been so far stayed.