ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to
Clotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and
mighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she
hint at rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips,
half closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.




CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!' . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his
affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer than
she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in
the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged
with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who
passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.
The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of
wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination
shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not
stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him