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 "Ah that's it!" she sighed. "The monotony. Though for that matter I could be happy in a cabin in the country with a cow and a pig and a few chickens. Here chick, chick, chick! That makes far more sense than all their cackle in the studios."

"But not alone!"

She scarcely heard him; she was admiring the idyll she had conjured up. "Ah, what happiness!"

"With me?" he insisted, his voice almost failing.

"Drink your coffee, Prince. Princes don't live in cabins; they live in palaces and don't think of the rent,—palaces that don't even exist—air palaces."

"Couldn't you live in an air palace?"

She burst into a merry laugh, which the little folds this time made no attempt to derail. "I'm the most practical girl in Paris," she declared.

"And the most seductive," he retorted passionately, "and unhappy—which isn't as it should be. You see what a mistake it is to be so practical. There's something to be said for air palaces. They're beautiful." Her taunt still hurt him, and whipped the flame higher. Suddenly, with a sensation of dizziness, he heard words coming to his lips which he couldn't check, however irrevocably they might alter his old inherited world.

"Would you marry me?" he asked.

Her merriment, her nonchalance faded. Into her face came a look of hardness that reminded him of the sphinx he had first seen petched upon Léon's piano. Then the hardness melted into an expression of tender-