It would be a life, at first, of some roughness and privation. Arbuthnot had laid the financial side quite clearly before him. He could not expect to land on the Solomon Islands without capital (and even a borrowed capital) and expect an income of a thousand pounds a year to drop into his mouth. If Elodie, although refusing to accompany him, would accept his allowance, that allowance, would, of arithmetical necessity, be far, far less than she had enjoyed during the war. Besides, although he was bound tentatively to suggest it, he knew the odd pride, the rod of steel through her nature, which he had come up against, to his own great advantage, time after time during their partnership, and he would have been the most astonished man in the world had she answered otherwise. Yes, the dream of coco-nuts and pearls had melted. She was right. Even had she consented, she would have been a ghastly failure in pioneer Colonial life. Their existence would have been mildewed and moth-eaten with misery. She knew herself and her limitations. To go and leave her to starve or earn a precarious livelihood with her birds, on this post-war music-hall stage avid for novelty of sensation, were an act as dastardly as that of the late Raoul Mares-caux who planted her there on the platform of the Gare St. Lazare while he was on his ways overseas with the modiste of the Place de la Madeleine. He turned to find her dabbing her eyes with a couple of square inches of chiffon which, in spite of its exiguity, had smeared the powder on her face. He sat down beside her, with his patient smile, and took her hand and patted it. "Come, come, my little Elodie. I am not going to leave you. It was only an idea. If it had attracted you, well and good. But as it doesn't, let us say no more about it." "I don't want to hinder you in your life, André," she said brokenly. "_Ça me donne beaucoup de peine_. But you see, don't you, that I couldn't do it?" He soothed her as best he could. Les Petit Patou would invent new business, of a comicality that would once more make their fortunes. That being so, why should they not be married? She looked at him searchingly. "You desire it as much as that?" "I desire earnestly," said he, "to do what is right." "Are you sure that it doesn't come from the respectability of an English General?" "I don't know how it comes," he replied, hiding the sting of the shrewd thrust with a laugh, "but it's there, all the same." "Well, I'll think of it," said Elodie, "but give me time. _Ne m'embête pas._" He promised not to worry her. "But tell me," he said, after a few moments' perplexity, "why were you so agitated all yesterday after you had seen that photograph?" Elodie let her hand fall on her lap and regarded him with pitying astonishment. "_Mon Dieu!_ What do you expect a woman to be when she learns that her husband, whom she thinks alive, has been killed two years ago?" Andrew gave it up.