“Oh, thank God!” he breathed. “Poniotowsky”—and she said his name with difficulty—“is coming to-night from Carlsbad.” The boy threw back his bright head and laughed wildly. “Curse him! The very name makes me want to commit a crime. He will go over my body to you. You hear me, Letty. I mean what I say.” People had already remarked them as they passed. The actress was too well-known to pass unobserved, but she was indifferent to their curiosity or to the existence of any one but this excited boy. Blair, who had not opened a paper since he came to Paris, did not know that Letty Lane’s flight from London had created a scandal in the theatrical world, that her manager was suing her, and that to be seen with her driving in the Bois was a conspicuous thing indeed. She thought of it, however. “I am going to tell the man to drive you to the gate on the other side of the park where it’s quieter, we won’t be stared at, and then I want you to leave me and let me go to the Meurice alone. You must, Dan, you must let me go to the hotel alone.” He laughed again in the same strained fashion and forced her hand to remain in his. “Look here. You don’t suppose I am going to let you go like this, now that I have seen you again. You don’t suppose I am going to give you up to that infamous scoundrel? You have got to marry me.” Bringing all her strength of character to bear, she exclaimed: “I expect you think you are the only person who has asked me to marry him, Dan. I am going to _marry_ Prince Poniotowsky. He is perfectly crazy about me.” Until that moment she had not made him think that she was indifferent to him, and the idea that such a thing was possible, was too much for his overstrained heart to bear. Dan cried her name in a voice whose appeal was like a hurt creature’s, and as the hurt creature in its suffering sometimes springs upon its torturer, he flung his arms around her as she sat in the motor, held her and kissed her, then set her free, and as the motor flew along, tore open the door to spring out or to throw himself out, but clinging to him she prevented his mad act. She stopped the car along the edge of the quiet, wooded _allée_. Blair saw that he had terrified her. She covered her beating heart with her hands and gasped at him that he was “crazy, crazy,” and perhaps a little late his dignity and self-possession returned. “I am mad,” he acknowledged more calmly, “and I am sorry that I frightened you. But you drive me mad.” Without further word he got out and left her agitated, leaning toward him, and Blair, less pale and thoroughly the man, lifted his hat to her and, with unusual grace, bowed good night and good-by. Then, rushing as he had come, he walked off down through the _allée_, his gray figure in his gray clothes disappearing through the vista of meeting trees.