"I shall not go as a bearer of news," the girl assured him; "I shall go only as a friend of her father's, and--because I want to." St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. When the girl gave him hers, he bent over it with a catch in his voice, but a remnant of the grand manner, and kissed her fingers in the fashion of the old days. Driving with Steele the next morning to St. John's lodgings, the girl looked straight ahead steadfastly. The rain of the night had been forgotten, and the life of Paris glittered with sun and brilliant abandon. Pleasure-worship and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along the _Champs Elysees_, from the _Place de la Concorde_ to the _Arc de Triomphe_, flowed a swift, continuous parade of motors, bearing in state gaily dressed women, until the nostrils were filled with a strangely blended odor of gasoline and flowers. The pavement cafes and sidewalks flashed color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch, did there seem a niche for sorrow. "Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?" questioned Steele. Duska shook her head. "I have no right to wait. And yet--yet, I can't go home!" She leaned toward him, impulsively. "I couldn't bear going back to Kentucky now," she added, plaintively; "I couldn't bear it." "You will go to Nice for a while," said Steele, firmly. He had fallen into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed in Duska's distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his direction. The girl nodded, apathetically. "It doesn't matter," she said. Then, she looked up again. "But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both of them." She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort: "And I don't want--I don't want you to speak of me. I don't want you to try to remind him." "He will question me," demurred Steele. Duska's head was raised with a little gesture of pride. "I am not afraid," she said, "that he will ask you anything he should not--anything that he has not the right to ask." CHAPTER XX