It is because the heroine is really nice, I suppose, that she at last persuades him that she does love her husband and not him. Then he goes away, and she, sinking down on the priedieu, listens to the click of his polished heels on the marble floor of the church. She sees at her feet the flowers which he had worn in his button-hole, and she picks them up and kisses them passionately. She is going to hide them in her bosom: but then being really nice she lays them before the figure of the Virgin, with a little prayer and then goes away.
As for the hero who is also the villain, he is piqued that it should be she that has stopped loving first; but is perhaps as well, he reflects, for she was beginning to bore him.
He looks at his watch and jumps into a cab. The horse goes fast, for the hero has an engagement at half-past five o’clock with Therese and has offered the cabman fifty centimes pour-boire if he will get to her house on time.
“SANS WINS, SANS SONG, SANS SINGER, AND—SANS END.”
I have another plot, but I do not expect ever to do anything with it. It is about the Man in the Iron Mask. Somebody is to be handling the iron mask—it is kept, I think, in the Invalides at Paris—when upon pressing a certain knob a hidden recess is to be revealed, constructed with marvelous ingenuity (as they always are you know) wherein is to be a paper telling all about the man in the iron mask.
There is nothing very original so far; but as I recollect this plot—I thought of it four years ago—the denouement was very striking. Unfortunately I have forgotten it.
Kenneth Brown.
