need it now--more than I. I am to be the judge of the value of your
story, however. Mark me, I know the main features, but I also know
that you have met her in the old days." The broken-down artist
flushed under the changed relation of guest and paid tool.

He uneasily stammered, as he filled a brandy glass, "As a loan--as
a loan!" But Hawke was sternly business-like in his reply.

"Don't make any pretenses with me. You are hard down on your luck,
and you know it. This is a mere matter of business." He unfolded a
bundle of notes and carelessly tossed two ten-pound notes over to
Casimir, who seized them with trembling fingers. The pitiful sum
represented to the artist two months of his meager salary. Here
was absinthe unlimited, a little roulette, a new frock for Madame
Frangipanni, perhaps even a dress coat for himself.

"How old do you think Alixe is?" unsteadily began the artist.

"I should say about twenty-five," gallantly replied the Major.

"We will premise that she is thirty-three," confidently began the
musician, "or even thirty-five. When I was a young fool at Warsaw,
eighteen years old," he babbled. "I was the local prodigy. My
first essays in public were, of course, concerts, and I was soon
the vogue. And, later, asked as an artistic guest to the chateaux
of the nobility in Poland, Kowno, Vitebsk, Wilna, Minsk, Grodno
and Volhynia. I was a poet in thought, a lover of all womankind in
my dreams, and a conspirator in the inmost chambers of my defiant
Polish nature."