cigarette for you--Blum Pasha. I smoke a little myself now and then,
but _c'est plus fort que moi_ and ends in head-ache.

Joko has at last learned to say 'Richard.' He trills the _r_
cunningly. He knows that he has little need to be jealous.

Good-bye!

ALICE."

He laughed and brought forth her picture which stood, framed and
glazed, upon his desk. A delicate, slender figure--"_blonde comme les
bles_"--with bluish grey, eager eyes and a mocking expression of the
lips--it was she herself, she who had made the last years of his life
truly livable and whose fate he administered rather than ruled.

She was the wife of a wealthy mine-owner whose estates abutted on his
and with whom an old friendship, founded on common sports,
connected him.

One day, suspecting nothing, Niebeldingk entered the man's house and
found him dragging his young wife from room to room by the hair....
Niebeldingk interfered and felt, in return, the lash of a whip....
Time and place had been decided upon when the man's physician forbade
the duel.... He had been long suspected, but no certain symptoms had
been alleged, since the brave little woman revealed nothing of the
frightful inwardness of her married life.... Three days later he was
definitely sent to a sanitarium. But between Niebeldingk and Alice the
memory of that last hour of suffering soon wove a thousand threads of
helplessness and pity into the web of love.