It was twenty minutes past seven when I paid my gondolier his fare at the railway station. I bought a first-class ticket to Milan and hurried down the long platform. Already the guards were calling to the passengers to take their places, and were closing the doors of the carriages.

Jacqueline herself I did not see, but her maid sat at the open window of a compartment reserved for women. Fortunately, it was a corridor train.

Before taking the casket to Jacqueline I cast one long look back at Venice. Never had her fairy architecture looked more entrancing, more ethereal. She was more mystical in this golden light than Arthur’s City of Avalon. But this enchantress of the seas had proved but a siren after all. For me her beauty had crumbled to ashes. Like my dreams, she had proved bitterly disappointing; for these dreams had been as intangible and difficult to realize as her charm.

I was turning my face away from the city of dead hopes and vanished dreams confidently to 301a workaday world; and if I could melt Jacqueline’s pride, and win her forgiveness, I might yet look forward to love and happiness.

I walked slowly down the corridor to her compartment. I stood quietly at the door a moment. She turned from the open window where she had been standing. There were tears in her eyes.

“Do you not think that you have caused me enough pain and embarrassment without troubling me further just now?”

“Jacqueline, you asked me to bring you the casket. You promised that you would listen to me when I brought it. There it is. It has cost me something, that casket–your love and your respect. In doing precisely what you asked me, I have lost all that is dearest to me in the world. But there it is. It is really the casket of da Sestos.”

I placed it on the seat beside her.

“All this is painfully theatrical, Mr. Hume,” she said disdainfully. “I can have no possible use for it. Will you please take it again? I wish to heaven that I had never heard of it.”

“Can you really be in earnest, Jacqueline?” I asked sadly. “Are you determined to be unjust? Are you quite resolved not to listen to me?”

“I am quite............