How he had laughed at the last clause, he and May Austin, as they wandered by the lily-pond that evening! And when she had persuaded him not at once to give it all up and marry penniless, he had tried to make the best of it. If she would not marry him then, what were eleven years? Eleven years--bah! August 14, 1886--why, he would only be thirty-three and she twenty-seven! But she had refused to make it an engagement, refused even to write to him; and the poor young Bachelor of Arts had gone off to his steamer most unhappily. And that farewell kiss under the lindens! And the letters he had written back--from Liverpool--beseeching May Austin to reconsider her determination! Austin May took another cigar from the box, and smiled pensively. Scene Second THE CODICIL I. AN IROQUOIS IN TROUVILLE. From Liverpool Austin May went to London; from London to Paris; from Paris by the special mail to Constantinople; thence to Athens and Alexandria; and thence to Bombay and Calcutta and Hong Kong; and the impetus of his flight had almost carried him over the Pacific and back to America again, but that he held back on the shore of Japan. He travelled in that country, then in Thibet or in Turkestan. Three years were spent by him in the acquisition of strange drugs, curious pipes, and embroideries, wild songs, and odd languages. He lived in Damascus, Samarcand, Morocco, possibly in Timbuctoo. History records not nor does May Austin, how often he wrote to her. But the summer of 1879 saw him alight at the Gare de Lyon, in Paris. The heat and solitude of that city were equally oppressive, and he fled to the nearest coast. That evening he was seated, robed in soft cloth and starched linen, on the wide veranda of the great _Hôtel des Rochers Noirs_, at Trouville.