Even in her childish heart there had been a mighty pride for the old gold and blue that were the colors of her grandfather's stables. They were silks that raced true to tradition, for no mere gambler's venturing, but for the gentleman's pride in his horse-flesh and his inherent love of sport. Much of the stamina that had kept her heart from breaking had been instilled in those lessons of the gallantry of the long struggle and the endurance of the home-stretch.

She remembered a certain chestnut colt whose name had gone down in turf history. She had known that colt from a weanling and to her he had not been an animal, but a personality.

Yet that splendid-hearted creature which could out-game his fields in a smothering drive when his heart was near bursting had been a disappointment in two-year-old form because he had seemed to sulk and falter and lack courage. Under the whip his speed died and his petulance cropped out. It had only been when a jockey was found whose soft touch of the reins nursed the head and held it up and encouraged, that the horse had come in to his own and made his name great. Might it not be so with a man as well as with a horse?

"Yes," she said, "it has been a bit of a trial, but it has been funny, too," and straightway she launched into a flow of anecdote that touched up with whimsical and delightful humor every bit of poor comedy that had tinged the days of the tour. And as she talked the man laughed with sheer delight and amusement.

But it was growing late, and Marcia was exhausted with the outflow of spirits. He might be comforted, but tomorrow she must again take up the dull thread of her routine. It would not be easier for tonight's disappointment; for the coming of the rescuing knight who upon arrival had only clamored mournfully for assistance.

After all she could only stand so much, and just now she felt that the margin of endurance was narrow. Yet there was to be said the most important thing of all, and the most trying.

"Paul," she began slowly, but in a voice of finality, "when you go back tomorrow, you mustn't come to see me again. At least not for a long while."

His face became a mask of tragic disappointment, and his voice was pleading.

"You are not going to reinstate your sentence of banishment, Marcia? You can't know what this evening has meant to me. A man must have in his life that comfort that only a woman like you can give. Surely you will give it."

"But, Paul," she said as gently as she would have argued with a child, "you must remember. There is a woman: a woman to whom you regard yourself pledged. Are you being very loyal to her? Are you being very loyal to either of us?"

To herself she added: "A woman whom I have never seen and whose battles I am called upon to fight."

"She's in Europe." Paul spoke rather sullenly, and though he said no more his voice intimated that so far as he was concerned she might remain there.

Marcia nodded her bend. "She is there to get a divorce--so that she can marry you. No, Paul, you know why I sent you away in the first place.

Since then nothing has changed--unless it is that I see more clearly the fatality of drifting. I can't do it."

"And you--" he spoke somewhat brokenly--"doesn't it mean anything to you?"

Suddenly and momentarily her self-restraint broke.

"Mean anything to me!" she exclaimed passionately as her eyes widened and her whole attitude relaxed into a posture of collapse in her chair.

"Mean anything--!" Then suddenly she straightened up and passed a hand across her brow as though to brush away a cloud that rested there. In a composed voice she added: "It means so much that you must do as I say, not merely until you feel like disobeying again, but always." After a long silence she rose. "I must get up early," she said, remembering that tomorrow brought its program of a train journey, a matinee and an evening performance.

"Paul," said Marcia as they walked back, "I have to leave a call for seven and catch a train at eight-thirty. There's no use in your getting up. No, please don't, and please don't hunt me out again." At the door of the hotel she said enigmatically, "What a wonderful balance Nature might have struck between your brother's strength and your--winning personality. Good-night."

The Duke de Metuan's failure to rehabilitate his impaired fortunes with Burton gold had left a more durable scar upon his optimism than any of the similar scars of the past. Mary Burton had been such a splendid combination of charm and opulence that a marriage with her would have made a pleasure of necessity. The Duke in his earlier stages of disappointment had felt first the pangs of a lover, and only in secondary degree the chagrin of a depleted exchequer. Several months had found him inconsolable, and when desperation had closed upon him he had wedded an estimable lady whose wealth was less dazzling than Mary's, but ample none the less. Her personal paucity of allurement was a handicap which his philosophy ignored as much as possible. In private he sometimes made a fastidious grimace, and accepted the inevitable.

Yet the duke had long been an epicure in life's pleasures, and though he must yield to the demands of his creditors, much as a young prince must yield to the edicts of his chancellery in making a required marriage, he did so with mental reservations. He had no intention of permitting that necessity to cast a perpetual cloud over his days and nights.

He had found it possible to leave his estate in Andalusia, where his duchess elected to remain with an imaginary malady from which she derived much melancholy pleasure, and in Nice he had been overjoyed to meet a charming acquaintance in the person of Loraine Haswell.

Loraine, too, was willing to have these hours which hung heavy alleviated with companionship, and Nice is a place where hours lend themselves to the process of being lightened.

There was a waiter at one of the esplanade cafes where the tables look out over the whiteness of the sea-front and the sapphire of the bay, who regarded his grace and madame as his regular clients. He knew without telling what _hors d'oeuvres_ and vintages the dark gentleman affected and at what pastries the beautiful lady preferred to nibble. She nibbled decoratively between peals of soft laughter and snatches of small talk.

The garcon in question noted--and officially ignored--that the lady, who had at first worn a preoccupied, almost troubled, expression about her dark eyes, now smiled more often, and that into the black pupils of Carlos de Metuan there came frequently a glow which was akin to ardor.

In the same way he noticed that occasionally their hands met and lingered, as the lady formed the habit of losing her handkerchief and the gentleman habituated himself to its retrieving. A legal separation cannot be established in a day, and if one must remain away from one's friends at home, one may surely console oneself with friends abroad.

The duke was lavish in his entertainment. His wife's fortune permitted that, as well as his wife's ignorance of the disbursements, and of late Loraine's supply of money from America had arrived on a scale of diminuendo. Entertainment was welcome.

Half-jokingly and veiled in phrases which she was at liberty to construe as she wished, there had of late been an insidious vein of suggestion in the duke's conversation.

"Were I not married and were you not married and were I able to convince you with an eloquence which I lack, I think I might be happy," he informed her one night as he studied his cigarette end in the dark. Then he laughed and his hand sought hers as he added: "Yet, thank God a thousand times, we live in a day when friendship need not go shackled by dark-age absurdities." That had been the beginning.

"Friendship," she replied demurely, "has never had to be shackled, has it?"

He leaned forward and she caught the glint of his eyes and a flash of white teeth, as he answered:

"When friendship between man and woman is a feeble little fellow, he goes free, but when he grows very strong, then his lot was not so easy in other days. You understand me?"

"I'm sure I don't, but what matter?" she laughed. Carlos shrugged his shoulders.

"Yes, what matter?" he murmured. "As long as we can be together, why should we seek names for our companionship? It is--what it is."

Yet Loraine, still sure of her future, spelling a congenial and luxurious life with Paul, understood what she pretended not to understand. The Duke de Metuan was not a riddle to her; not even a figure tinged with mystery. His wife was an unlovely invalid. Her sole value was monetary, and the duke's hints and thoughts had all to do with an arrangement wherein life should yield him the compensating delights which his family denied.

Loraine's fastidiousness rather shuddered at this idea, yet perhaps a certain sort of character disintegration had set in, with her first cutting loose the moorings of preconceived standards. Possibly it was working a more rapid atrophy than she knew. She told herself that, in her exile, Carlos made a rather diverting companion, and that since she understood his purpose she could with ease control the situation. He should amuse and no more. If his hints became less ambiguous than she found agreeable, she would send him packing, but meanwhile she would permit his luncheons and his motors to serve her. The food and roads about Nice are excellent--and expensive.

CHAPTER XXVIII

There is in the western hemisphere one town whose local news is national news and international news. Its celebrities wear names which the nation mouths over with gusto, and its own name was, until comparatively recently, New Amsterdam. The country closely followed the first-column stories with which the press sought to keep abreast of the affairs of Hamilton Montagu Burton. It was interesting reading, for it dealt with a late potentate of power untold; now an invalid whose brain slept like a child taking its forenoon nap while his millions, counted in scores and hundreds, went back to their sources as the sun draws water into the clouds to spill it out again elsewhere. A giant of untold might had kindled the fires that slept at the heart of a volcano--and then had fallen asleep upon the slopes down which the lava must flow!

While he slept, Ruin, spelling itself with a capital letter, had signaled out the one pedestaled figure which had laughed at ruin, and mocked its potency and bragged of a star which was above menace.

Hamilton Burton lay for weeks in insensibility and delirium and when, in returned consciousness, he realized his predicament he raved like a madman against restraint, counting the precious moments, which were being used against him, bleeding him of vital power. This very fretting against the inevitable burdened him with a waste of nerve and brain which should send him forth, depleted in strength and weakened in resistance, to meet his adversaries.

Nor had the forces aligned against him marked time. When again he took the field he must take it in a realm of altered and shrunken boundaries, and the roll-call of his allies would show many missing--and many gone over to the foe. But greater than all these things was the change in himself. The cloyed wolf who had gorged too deep of success was no longer the lean fighting beast with a ravenous light of conquest in his eyes. That Burton might have met even the present and triumphed. This was a wolf on the defensive, fating a pack which had turned upon his leadership. His weakened fangs were against the jaws of all the rest--and he came scarred and spent from days and nights of physical feebleness.

Paul sat beside Hamilton in his car as they drove down-town on that first day when the financier defied the edicts of his physicians.

"Hamilton," questioned the younger brother, voicing for the first time that deep anxiety which had been clamoring within him for weeks, "will you be able to drive back your assailants? The papers predict that your reign is broken and your ruin near at hand."

Hamilton raised his face and smiled. It was the old imperious smile, but the face over which it spread was thinner and gaunter and between the hollowed cheekbones the smile lost something of its wonted illumination--failed somewhat of its old convincing force.

"The papers have had their opportunity to prattle without check. Now I am back again--we shall see." He broke off and laughed, then he rushed on fiercely. "They call this St. Helena. They lie." In the weakness which was still upon him, he gasped a moment for breath. "When Napoleon left Elba the papers of Paris raved about the escape of the unspeakable tyrant. When he reached the borders of France they announced, without comment, the approach of Napoleon Bonaparte, but when he was near the gates they raised a paean of triumphal welcome to the Emperor, who had returned to make France more glorious than ever among nations! I shall soon be at their city gates, Paul, and, while my star shines, no mortal power can stop me or stay my progress."

But the Napoleon of the later phases was not the Napoleon of Austerlitz.

Out of the great heart and brain some essential element had gone.

Burton, too, had tasted defeat and knew its bitterness. He was going back to rally shrunken forces and lead a forlorn hope and his eyes were grimly defiant--where once they had been regnantly confident. Perhaps Hamilton Burton during those next few months was after all more worthy of admiration than he had been since a boy whose dreams burned city-ward. Feeling each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him back--back--ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he said even now that his star was infallible.

But in the privacy of his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the enemy, with the old guard about him ... and when the end came, like another Antony, he would fall on his own sword.