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 summation of some sort, no matter how disastrous or how short-lived, there would be at least some justification for the picture; but the whole irony of it was that there was not even for him the memory of that: nothing but an unfulfilled promise.

Next morning the sight of the folders was irksome to him, and for several days his mind showed a perverse inclination to occupy itself with the novel. In the revised version life was not to be quite so tragic; indeed it was to be a tolerably livable sort of thing, with actually enjoyable moments.

Brooding over the false picture in Rhoda's mind encouraged the banished image of Olga to come back, and it was now the friendly Olga, the Olga who had yielded to him in the dance, rather than the stony-faced girl. And one evening, as though the return of the image had been a premonition,—and he had observed that almost no surprising event in life is without some subtle form of premonitory preparation,—he came face to face with her.

In a sense he had asked for it, for, walking home from a theatre near the grands boulevards, he had obeyed an impulse to look in at the cafe in the rue Caumartin, from which he could hear sounds of restrained revelry as he passed the door.

In a corner sat Léon Vaudreuil with Olga and a florid woman whom he did not at first recognize for