wise in the ways of this world than I cared to see. The treatment
was daring, and it cut me like a knife that the whole painting had
a red glow: the dress was red, the light falling on the hair was
red, the shine of the eyes was red also. It was fascinating, but
weird, and, to me, distressful. There flashed through my mind the
remembrance of Mathilde in her scarlet robe as she stood on the
Heights that momentous night of my arrest. I looked at the picture
in silence. He kept gazing at it with a curious, half-quizzical
smile, as if he were unconscious of my presence. At last he said,
with a slight knitting of his brows:

"It is strange--strange. I sketched that in two nights ago, by
the light of the fire, after I had come from the Chateau St.
Louis--from memory, as you see. It never struck me where the effect
was taken from, that singular glow over all the face and figure.
But now I see it; it returns: it is the impression of colour in the
senses, left from the night that lady-bug Mathilde flashed out on
the Heights! A fine--a fine effect! H'm! for another such one might
give another such Mathilde!"

At that moment we were both startled by a sound behind us, and,
wheeling, we saw Voban, a mad look in his face, in the act of
throwing at Doltaire a short spear which he had caught up from a
corner. The spear flew from his hand even as Doltaire sprang aside,
drawing his sword with great swiftness. I thought he must have been
killed, but the rapidity of his action saved him, for the spear
passed his shoulder so close that it tore away a shred of his coat,
and stuck in the wall behind him. In another instant Doltaire had
his sword-point at Voban's throat. The man did not cringe, did not
speak a word, but his hands clinched, and the muscles of his face