Then she sent some kindly message to Mrs. McVeigh, but refused to see the wonder--the actual pain--in the eyes where before she had remembered those half slumberous smiles, or that brief space of passionate pleading. He interrupted some cool remark by rising. "It is scarcely worth while--all this," he said, abruptly. "Had you closed your doors against me after last night I should have understood--I should have gone away adoring you just the same. But to open them, to receive me, and then--" His voice trembled in spite of himself. All at once he appeared so much more boyish than ever before--so helpless in a sort of misery he could not account for, she turned away her head. "With the ocean between us my love could not have hurt you. You might have let me keep that." He had recovered control of his voice and his eyes swept over her from head to foot like blue lightning. "I bid you good-day, Madame." She made an inclination of the head, but did not speak. She had reached the limit of her self control. His words, "_You might have let me keep that_," were an accusation she dared not discuss. When the door closed behind him she could see nothing, for the blur of tears in her eyes. Madame La Marquise received no other callers that day. In the days following she compared him with the courtiers, the diplomats, the very clever men whom she met, and told herself he was only a boy--a cadet of twenty-two. Why should she remember his words, or forget for one instant that infamy with which his name was connected? "He goes on his knees to me only because he has grown weary of the slave-women of the plantations," she told herself in deepest disgust. Sometimes she would look curiously at the hands once covered by his kisses. And once she threw a withered bunch of forget-me-nots from her window, at night, and crept down at daybreak next morning and found it, and took it back to her room. It looked as though the boy was holding his own despite the diplomats. When she saw him again it was at an auction of articles donated for a charity under the patronage of the Empress, and open to the public. Cotton stuffs justled my lady's satins, and the half-world stared at short range into the faces whose owners claimed coronets. Many leading artists had donated sketches of their more pretentious work. It was to that department the Marquise made her way, and entering the gallery by a side door, found that the crowd had separated her from the Countess Biron and the rest of their party.