“The Cleopatra, do you mean?” she said. “That was my chaperon, the Comtesse de Varigny. Why do you ask?” He gave a short, relieved laugh. “No particular reason,” he returned with some constraint “She reminded me--extraordinarily--of someone I used to know, that’s all. Even the timbre of her voice was similar. It startled me for a moment.” He dismissed the matter with apparent indifference, and led Jean again into the same little alcove in which he had found her. They stood together silently in the dim, rose-hued twilight diffused by the shaded lamp above. “Well,” he said at last, slowly, reluctantly. “So this is really the end of our stolen day.” Jean’s hands, hanging loosely clasped in front of her, suddenly tightened their grip of each other. She felt herself struggling in the press of new and incomprehensible emotions. A voice within her was crying out rebelliously: “Why? Why must it be the end? Why not--other days?” Pride alone kept her silent. It was his choice, his decision, that they were not to meet again, and if he could so composedly define the limits of their acquaintance, she was far too sensitively proud to utter a word of protest. After all, he was only the comrade of a day. How--why should it matter to her whether he stayed or went? “I always believe”--the Englishman was speaking again, his eyes bent on hers--“I always believe that, no matter how sad or tragic people’s lives may be, God invariably gives them one magic moment--so that they may believe in heaven.... I have had mine to-day.” “Don’t you--believe in heaven?” He laid his hands lightly on her shoulders. “I do now. I believe... in a heaven that is out of my reach.” His hands slipped upward from her shoulders, cupping her face, and for a moment he held her so, staring down at her with grave, inscrutable eyes. Then, stooping his head, he kissed her lips. “Good-bye, little comrade,” he said unevenly. “Thank you for my magic moment.” He turned away sharply. She heard his step, followed by the quick, jarring rattle of brass rings jerked violently along the curtain-pole, and a moment later he was gone. With a dull sense of finality she watched the heavy folds of the portière swing sullenly back into their place. CHAPTER VII--WHICH DEALS WITH REFLECTIONS THE dawn of a new day possesses a curious potency of readjustment. It is as though Dame Nature, like some autocratic old nurse, wakes us up and washes and dresses our minds afresh for us each morning, so that they come to the renewed consideration of the affairs of life freed from the influences and emotions which were clogging their pores when we went asleep. Not infrequently, in the course of this species of mental ablution, a good deal of the glamour which invested the doings of the previous day gets scrubbed off, and a new and not altogether pleasing aspect of affairs presents itself.