* * * * * Pidge was alone. _The Lance of the Rivernais_ was pricking at her to get back to work, but she resisted for a few minutes, thinking of Miss Claes. “... She may be crazy, but she’s good to look at,” she muttered. “I believe she can look into me, too.... I wonder what she is?... She may be crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she yawned a moment later. “I’d like--I’d like to be a leaf in the park under the snow--still snowing, and sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast turkey first.” The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, but it was all too dainty for one who had eaten little or nothing since yesterday morning. Her mind trailed off to buns she had seen in bakery windows; and delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’s head and colored like tapestries, and little brown birds and deviled eggs, and sliced filets of fish of amazing tint. All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. Adolph Musser. Pidge had lived in no other house in all her years, before coming to New York, but since then, she had shocked her young self through various experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not so various, for the narrowness of her purse was ever a limp fact, but these few flavory adventures were exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger nail upon the panel. “A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said. She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from ever before. He had sold a story. She wanted to speak of it, wanted to sit before him and listen--this anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard through the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She was prejudiced against Hindus, because her father had affected such a knowledge of them, but somehow she had been less lonely in New York because of this one. He was embodied Detachment and Impersonality.... He had turned away. “Thanks, Nagar,” she called. The letter was a typewriter bill. IV LAMBILL KNOCKS INSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the moat into the pictured halls, up the marble staircase, driving straight and true, Lambill Courtenay, a man of the people--artist, swordsman, lover virgin-hearted, rode--no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, straight to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble castle of the Rivernais, and with his ungloved hand touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary. “Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of violins. “I----” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lambill Courtenay, Frenchiest of the French. Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie opened. Lambill crossed the threshold. The white arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and the heavens opened also--for the great maze of life had been untangled for these two--and Pidge Musser’s book was done.