Without waiting for my reply, he seized the dangling end of the speaking-tube and spoke to the driver, and we swerved round and regained the boulevard.

And in the private room of a great, glittering restaurant, one of a long row of private rooms off a corridor, I ate strawberries and cream and sipped champagne while Diaz went through the entire menu of a supper.

‘Your eyes look sad,’ he murmured, with a cigar between his teeth.  ’What is it?  We shall see each other again in a fortnight.’

He was to resume his career by a series of concerts in the United States.  A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents, had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played at no concert before he played in New York.  And in order to reach New York in time for the first concert, it was imperative that he should catch the Touraine at Havre.  I was to follow in a few days by a Hamburg-American liner.  Diaz had judged it more politic that we should not travel together.  In this he was undoubtedly right.

I smiled proudly.

‘I am both sad and happy,’ I answered.

He moved his chair until it touched mine, and put his arm round my neck, and brought my face close to his.

‘Look at me,’ he said.

And I looked into his large, splendid eyes.

‘You mustn’t think,’ he whispered, ’that, because I don’t talk about it, I don’t feel that I owe everything to you.’

I let my face fall on his breast.  I knew I had flushed to the ears.

‘My poor boy,’ I sobbed, ’if you talk about that I shall never forgive you.’

It was heaven itself.  No woman has ever been more ecstatically happy than
I was then.

He rang for the bill.

We parted at the door of my hotel.  In the carriage we had exchanged one long, long kiss.  At the last moment I wanted to alter the programme, go with him to his hotel to assist in his final arrangements, and then see him off at early morning at the station.  But he refused.  He said he could not bear to part from me in public.  Perhaps it was best so.  Just as I turned away he put a packet into my hand.  It contained seven banknotes for ten thousand francs each, money that it had been my delight to lend him from time to time.  Foolish, vain, scrupulous boy!  I knew not where he had obtained—­

* * * * *

It is now evening.  Diaz is on the sea.  While writing those last lines I was attacked by fearful pains in the right side, and cramp, so that I could not finish.  I can scarcely write now.  I have just seen the old English doctor.  He says I have appendicitis, perhaps caused by pips of strawberries.  And that unless I am operated on at once—­And that even if—­He is telephoning to the hospital.  Diaz!  No; I shall come safely through the affair.  Without me Diaz would fall again.  I see that now.  And I have had no child.  I must have a child.  Even that girl in the blue peignoir had a—­Chance is a strange—­