The Uttermost Farthing

Laurence Vanderlyn, unpaid attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, strode down thelong grey platform marked No. 5, of the Gare de Lyon. It was seven o'clock, the hour atwhich Paris is dining or is about to dine, and the huge station was almost deserted. The train de luxe had gone more than an hour ago, the Riviera rapide would not start tillten, but one of those trains bound for the South, curiously named demi-rapides, was timedto leave in twenty minutes. Foreigners, especially Englishmen and Americans, avoid these trains, and this was whyLaurence Vanderlyn had chosen it as the starting point of what was to be a great adventure, an adventure which must for ever be concealed, obliterated as much as may be from hisown memory-do not men babble in delirium?-once life had again become the rathergrey thing he had found it to be. In the domain of the emotions it is the unexpected which generally happens, and now itwas not only the unexpected but the incredible which had happened to this Americandiplomatist. He and Margaret Pargeter, the Englishwoman whom he had loved with anabsorbing, unsatisfied passion, and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless devotion, for seven years, were about to do that which each had sworn, together and separately, should never come to pass, -that is, they were about to snatch from Fate a few days of suchfree happiness and communion as during their long years of intimacy they had neverenjoyed. In order to secure these fleeting moments of joy, she, the woman in the case, wasabout to run the greatest risk which can in these days be incurred by civilised woman. Margaret Pargeter was not free as Vanderlyn was free; she was a wife, -not a happy wife, but one on whose reputation no shadow had ever rested, -and further, she was the motherof a child, a son, whom she loved with an anxious tenderness.... It was these two facts whichmade what she was going to do a matter of such moment not only to herself, but to the manto whom she was now about to commit her honour. Striding up and down the platform to which he had bought early access by one of thoselarge fees for which the travelling American of a certain type is famed, Vanderlyn, with hislong lean figure, and stern pre-occupied face, did not suggest, to the French eyes idlywatching him, a lover, -still less the happy third in one of those conjugal comedies whichplay so much greater a part in French literature and in French drama than they do inFrench life. He had thrust far back into his heart the leaping knowledge of what was aboutto befall him, and he was bending the whole strength of his mind to avert any possibledanger of ignoble catastrophe to the woman whom he was awaiting, and whose suddensurrender was becoming more, instead of less, amazing as the long minutes dragged