"You've heard?" she had said. "Alec's just told me." "Of course----" The unuttered words were "with him." "It looks terribly like it." "Had you any idea?" This with a look so imperious that I was thankful to be able to reply truthfully. "None. Is there anything--any little thing--we may do?" "Settle that with Alec. I must be with her." And that had been about all. I had not dared to ask her whether there was anything I could do for herself. But if not because she had failed, at least because of this all-at-once dropping of the bottom out of everything for which she had lived, one heart in Dinan resumed its ache for her that night. Stratagems learned of any man, though she broke his heart with a laugh in the learning--and then to have her own broken! Arms to provoke the world--and no world to be provoked now that he, her world, had failed her! Nothing had been too little for her, nothing too great. Officers' Woodbines and her adoration of his painting, his years of war and a hat that hid one eye! What were those arms and shoulders of hers but his own gesture, ready to be given back to him, when he had shown himself in my swimming-pond, in that studio in Cremorne Road? How she had dreamed to glory in herself; what glories, for all I knew, had she not planned for the very next day! And all, all to have gone in the seeming security of that very moment when she had thought her rival out of the way! "New bicycles for old," she had planned, a new free-wheel with packing about its saddle and string and paper round its polished parts; but not a wheel would any bicycle ever turn now to help her. The last she had seen of this man whose destiny she had so arrogantly made her own was when he had shown her a picture--a picture of her young victress, lying among white masonry as ruined as Julia Oliphant's hope. And even that she had had to ask to see. The greengrocer under the Porche to the left was putting up his last shutter, the seller of hardware and Breton pottery across the way had already done so. Elsewhere from under the houses' bellies dim gleams of light showed as if through horn. In the upper stories window shone into window across the street--half Dinan is in bed by half-past nine. A priest in soutane and pancake hat hurried past, glancing into my retreat as he did so. Presently there was little light except that that streamed from the doorway behind me, yellowing the artificial hedge and showing the elephantine feet opposite--still where they were. Even this light was darkened as a couple of _convives_, with a "Bonsoir, Madame," blocked the doorway for a moment, gave me also a muttered "Bonsoir," and mingled with the shadows down the street. I watched them disappear. But before they were quite lost among the trampling Porches there cut across my opening, quick as a zoetrope-flicker, and with the single little "ting" of an ill-adjusted bell, a bicycle.