“Thanks,” he answered. “I may ask you to later on. But just now—” He paused. “But can’t you see yourself, you wicked child, without stripping yourself as naked as you were born?”!

A figure was loitering the other side of the street when she reached home. She thought she somehow recognized it, and crossed over. It was McKean, smoking his everlasting pipe. Success having demanded some such change, he had migrated to “The Albany,” and she had not seen him for some time. He had come to have a last look at the house—in case it might happen to be the last. He was off to Scotland the next morning, where he intended to “join up.” “Madge has fallen in love with him, and her judgment is not to be relied upon,” he said. “I suppose you couldn’t answer a straight question, if you tried.”

“Perhaps God cannot help there being weak things,” answered Joan. “Perhaps He, too, is sorry for them.” He led the way to the piano. “Tell Madge I want her,” he whispered. He struck a few notes; and then in a voice that drowned every other sound in the room, struck up a comic song. “Ah,” he said, “you would understand if you had. When one of the horses goes down gored, his entrails lying out upon the sand, you know what they do, don’t you? They put a rope round him, and drag him, groaning, into the shambles behind. And once there, kind people like you and Monsieur le Médecin tend him and wash him, and put his entrails back, and sew him up again. He thinks it so kind of them—the first time. But the second! He understands. He will be sent back into the arena to be ripped up again, and again after that. This is the third time I have been wounded, and as soon as you’ve all patched me up and I’ve got my breath again, they’ll send me back into it. Mam’selle will forgive my not feeling grateful to her.” He gave a short laugh that brought the blood into his mouth.