“God!” said the boy under his breath. “That’s the way you think about truth. Lie to a woman to save my precious soul! But I expect,” he said; “you think she is so immoral and so bad that she will hurt me. Well,” he said, with great emphasis, “she has never done anything in her life that comes up to what you’ve done. Never! And nothing has ever hurt me so.” His lips trembled. “I have lost my respect for you, for my father’s friend, and as far as she is concerned, I don’t care what she marries me for. She has got to marry me, and if she doesn’t”—he had no idea, in his passion, what he was saying or how—“why, I think I’ll kill you first and then blow my own brains out!” And with these mad words he grabbed up his valise and bolted from the room, and Ruggles could hear his running feet tearing down the corridor. CHAPTER XXVI—WHITE AND CORAL Spring in Paris, which comes in a fashion so divine that even the most calloused and indifferent are impressed by its beauty, awakened no answering response in the heart of the young man who, from his hotel window, looked out on the desecrated gardens of the Tuileries—on the distant spires of the churches whose names he did not know—on the square block of old palaces. He had missed the boat across the Channel taken by Letty Lane, and the delay had made him lose what little trace of her he had. In the early hours of the morning he had flung himself in at the St. James, taken the indifferent room they could give him in the crowded season, and excited as he was he slept and did not waken until noon. Blair thought it would be a matter of a few hours only to find the whereabouts of the celebrated actress, but it was not such an easy job. He had not guessed that she might be traveling incognito, and at none of the hotels could he hear news of her, nor did he pass her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cafés, and went everywhere that he thought she might be likely to be. At the end of the third day, unsuccessful and in despair, having hardly slept and scarcely eaten, the unhappy young lover found himself taking a slight luncheon in the little restaurant known as the Perouse down on the Quais. His head on his hand, for the present moment the joy of life gone from him, he looked out through the windows at the Seine, at the bridge and the lines of flowering trees. He was the only occupant of the upper room where, of late, he had ordered his luncheon.