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said she would live with him no more, that she had been a fool to marry a man whom she had only known for a few months and of whose family she knew nothing. She said she would give him an allowance of a thousand francs a month if he would sheer off and get out of her sight and never let her see him again.

      “He sat listening to all this without a sign of shame and when she’d finished he flattened her out by calmly asking for fifteen hundred a month instead of a thousand. Never said he was sorry, just asked for a bigger allowance as if he was talking to a business man he was doing a deal with instead of a wife he had injured and outraged. Even the old lawyer was sick, and it takes a lot to sicken a French lawyer, I can tell you that.

      “What does she do? She says: ‘I’ll allow you two thousand a month on the condition I never see your face or hear from you again. If you show yourself before me,’ she says, ‘or write to me, I’ll stop the allowance. If you try to move the law to make us live together, I’ll turn all my money into gold coin and throw it in the sea and myself after it, you beast,’ she says.

      “And he says, ‘All right, all right, don’t fly away with things,’ he says. ‘Give me my allowance and you’ll never see me again.’

      “One day an old woman turned up at her house asking her to come at once to where he was living as he was mortally ill and couldn’t hold out more than a few hours.

      “She didn’t think twice, but came, taking a cab and being landed in a little old back street at the door of a house that stood between a thieves’ café and a rag shop.

      “Up the stairs she went, following the old woman, and into a room where his royal highness was lying with a jug of whisky on the floor beside him and a hectic blush on his cheeks.

      “‘I’m dying,’ he says, ‘and I want to tell you something you ought to know. I was sent to New Caledonia,’ he says, ‘for a robbery committed by another man.’

      “She thought he was raving, but she says, ‘Go on.’

      “‘Armand and I were twins,’ he says, ‘as like as two peas. Armand could do nothing. He stayed in Paris while poor Charles—that’s me—went making roads on Noumea. Then you married him.’

      “‘But you are Armand,’ she cries, ‘you are my husband or am I mad?’

      “‘Not a bit,’ says he. ‘I’m Charles, his twin brother.

      “‘A year ago you and him came in a big yacht to Noumea and the governor sent me one night to have a talk with him. When we were alone he told me how his heart had been burning a hole in him for years, how he had married a rich woman—that’s you—and how when he was happy and rich his heart had burned him worse so that the doctors not knowing what was wrong with him had ordered him a sea voyage.’ Then Charles goes on to tell how Armand had come to the conclusion that even if he helped Charles to escape this likeness between them would lead surely to the giving away of the whole show, make trouble among the crew of the yacht and so on—besides the fact that it was next to impossible for a man to escape from Noumea in the ordinary way. But said Armand, ‘We can change places and no one will know. Strip and change here and now,’ he says, ‘the guards are outside, I’ll take your place and go to prison and you’ll be free. I’ve got a scissors here and two snips will make our hair the same, and by good luck we are both clean shaven. You’ve done half your sentence of ten years and I’ll do the other half,’ he says. ‘The only bargain I’ll make is that you’ll respect my wife and live apart from her and, after a while, you’ll break the news to her and, maybe, when I’m free in five years she’ll forgive me.’

      “Charles finishes up by excusing himself for the drink, saying if she’d served five years without the chance of a decent wet all that time she’d maybe have done as he’d done.

      “He died an hour after and there was that woman left with lots to thank about—first of all her husband wasn’t the drunkard that had disgraced her, but he was a convict serving his time and serving it wrongfully.

      “The thundering great fact stood up like a shot tower before her that Armand wasn’t the drunkard that had disgraced her in two ports and before a ship’s company, wasn’t the swine that took her allowance and asked for more. That he was a saint, if ever a man was a saint.

      “She rushed home, telegraphed to Marseilles and recommissioned the Gaudriole that was still lying at the wharves. A week later she sailed again for Noumea.

      “On the voyage she plotted and planned. She had determined to save him from the four years or so of the remains of his sentence at all costs and hazards, and when the yacht put in here she had a plan fixed on, but it was kiboshed by the fact that the governor, as I have said, was changed. However she took up residence for a while in the town. People she had known before called on her and she gave out that her husband was dead.

      “You can fancy how a rich widow was run after by all and sundry, myself included—not that I had any idea about her money. I only cared for herself. She knew this as women know such things, by instinct. She had asked for my help. I’m a strange chap in some ways. I had liked her enough to ruin myself for her by risking everything to give her husband back to her, and between us we had worked out a plan that was a pippin.

      “It would have freed Armand only that we found on inquiring about him that he had already escaped—he was dead. Died of fever two months before she came.

      “I heard once of a Japanese child that said her doll was alive because she loved it so much, adding that if you loved anything enough it lived. Well, in my experience, if you love anything enough you can make it love you.

      “That woman stayed on in Noumea and I made her love me. At last I married her. You know her—she is my wife. She loves Armand still, as a memory, and for the sake of his memory we live here. It’s as good a place to live as anywhere else, especially now that they have settled to send no more convicts from France.”

      AN OPEN WINDOW, by Robert E. Howard

      Behind the Veil what gulfs of Time and Space?

      What blinking mowing Shapes to blast the sight?

      I shrink before a vague colossal Face

      Born in the mad immensities of Night.

      BY ANOTHER SEA, by George Sterling

      The Western gull is whiter than a dove

      Or the ungathered foam.

      I close the eyelids, and again I roam

      The meadowlands of forty years ago.

      I see the osprey circling far above,

      Come back to the old nest from Mexico,

      And we are young once more, O boyhood love!

      The spray of that last wave is on my face.

      Time breaks. We hide again

      Beneath the cedar from the April rain.

      O Youth’s forgotten music, lost to me!

      Ocean and sea wind echo now your grace;

      But what one wave can tell us of the sea

      Is more than all I learn of time and place.

      Dear days, a little while our very own!

      Dear mouth I never kissed!

      The years between us gather like the mist.

      It is enough to know you are no more.

      It is enough to know I walk alone.

      Still cries the ocean on that distant shore,

      But farther than the osprey have you flown.

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