cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy, that he was forlorn. 'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world, and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.' 'But have you no friends?' I ventured. 'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.' 'And no home?' 'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I loathe it.' 'Why do you loathe it?' 'Ah! For what it has witnessed--for what it has witnessed.' He sighed. 'Suppose we discuss something else.' You must remember my youth, my inexperience, my lack of adroitness in social intercourse. I talked quietly and slowly, like my aunt, and I know that I had a tremendous air of sagacity and self-possession; but beneath that my brain and heart were whirling, bewildered in a delicious, dazzling haze of novel sensations. It was not I who spoke, but a new being, excessively perturbed into a consciousness of new powers. I said: 'You say you are friendless, but I wonder how many women are dying for love of you.' He started. There was a pause. I felt myself blushing. 'Let me guess at your history,' he said. 'You have lived much alone with your thoughts, and you have read a great deal of the finest romantic poetry, and you have been silent, especially with men. You have seen little of men.' 'But I understand them,' I answered boldly. 'I believe you do,' he admitted; and he laughed. 'So I needn't explain to you that a thousand women dying of love for one man will not help that man to happiness, unless he is dying of love for the thousand and first.' 'And have you never loved?' The words came of themselves out of my mouth. 'I have deceived myself--in my quest of sympathy,' he said. 'Can you be sure that, in your quest of sympathy, you are not deceiving yourself tonight?'