face with a sort of reluctant admiration for the man who could bear so much without any sign whatever.  In the end he put together his things and nodded with professional satisfaction.  “You’ll do well enough now for the rest of the day,” he said.  “I’ll send up old Michel to valet you.  He’s the gardener who shot you yesterday, and he may take it into his head to finish the job this morning.  If he does I sha’n’t try to stop him.”

“Nor I,” said Ste. Marie.  “Thanks very much for your trouble.  An excellent surgeon was lost in you.”

O’Hara left the room, and presently the old caretaker, one-eyed, gnomelike, shambling like a bear, sidled in and proceeded to set things to rights.  He looked, Ste. Marie said to himself, like something in an old German drawing, or in those imitations of old drawings that one sometimes sees nowadays in Fliegende Blaetter.  He tried to make the strange creature talk, but Michel went about his task with an air half-frightened, half-stolid, and refused to speak more than an occasional “oui” or a “bien, Monsieur,” in answer to orders.  Ste. Marie asked if he might have some coffee and bread, and the old Michel nodded and slipped from the room as silently as he had entered it.

Thereafter Ste. Marie trifled with the cat and got one hand well scratched for his trouble, but in five minutes there came a knocking at the door.  He laughed a little.  “Michel grows ceremonious when it’s a question of food,” he said.  “Entrez, mon vieux!”

The door opened, and Ste. Marie caught his breath.

“Michel is busy,” said Coira O’Hara, “so I have brought your coffee.”

She came into the sunlit room holding the steaming bowl of cafe au lait before her in her two hands.  Over it her eyes went out to the man who lay in his bed, a long and steady and very grave look.  “A goddess that lady, a queen among goddesses—­” Thus the little Jew of the Boulevard de la Madeleine.  Ste. Marie gazed back at her, and his heart was sick within him to think of the contemptible role Fate had laid upon this girl to play:  the candle to the moth, the bait to the eager, unskilled fish, the lure to charm a foolish boy.

The girl’s splendid beauty seemed to fill all that bright room with, as it were, a richer, subtler light.  There could be no doubt of her potency.  Older and wiser heads than young Arthur Benham’s might well forget the world for her.  Ste. Marie watched, and the heartsickness within him was like a physical pain, keen and bitter.  He thought of that first and only previous meeting—­the single minute in the Champs-Elysees, when her eyes had held him, had seemed to beseech him out of some deep agony.  He thought of how they had haunted him afterward both by day and by night—­calling eyes—­and he gave a little groan of sheer bitterness, for he realized that all this while she was laying her snares about the feet of an inexperienced boy, decoying him to his ruin.  There was a name for such women, an ugly name.  They were called adventuresses.