in the dissipations of the gayest city in the world—for such a man the facility afforded by the side door in the court would be invaluable.
Had Wyllard been such a man? Had Wyllard lived a double life during the ten years of his Parisian existence?
Such a thing seemed to the last degree unlikely. Difficult to suppose that he could have given his nights to pleasure and folly—he who had succeeded as a foreigner in a field where native talent had so often failed; he who had penetrated the innermost labyrinths of the financial world, and had always been a winner in the hazardous game where the reckless and the idle must inevitably end as losers; he who had the flair for successful enterprises which had been spoken of to Heathcote as little short of inspiration; he who had been respected by the cleverest men on the Paris Bourse, looked up to as the hardest worker and keenest thinker among them all. No, such a man could not have given his nights to pleasure, could not have rioted among foolish revellers betwixt midnight and morning—to go back to his den in the early dawn, and to begin a new day, half rested, bemused by wine and folly.
No, such a man could not have habitually lived the Boulevard life, could not have been the associate of fools and light women. He could not so have lived without the fact of his folly being known to everybody in Paris. And Edward Heathcote had heard his rival praised for the sobriety and steadiness of his life, wondered at as a miracle of industry and good conduct, a man of one idea and one ambition. He had heard Julian Wyllard so spoken of by men who knew their Paris. He had heard his character discussed and sifted years ago, at the time of his marriage with Dora Dalmaine.
That Julian Wyllard could have lived a profligate life was impossible; but that theory of a double life did not necessarily imply dissipation or folly. What of a man who concealed from the world his inner life, the life of passion and emotion, who abandoned himself in secretness and obscurity to his all-absorbing love for a woman whom he dared not acknowledge before society? Such a man might verily be said to lead a double life—and Julian Wyllard might have been such a man.
Heathcote looked at his watch when he entered the Rue Lafitte. He had walked the distance in a quarter of an hour.
He had made a note of the number of the house in which Marie Prévol had lived. It was 117, about half-way between the Boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. It was to this house that he now directed his steps, impelled by the desire to see the rooms in which the beautiful young actress had lived—if it were possible to see them. In this dead season, when so many of the residents of Paris were absent, there was just the chance that some good-natured concierge—and the concierge is always
