together, with a melodious burst of laughter.

— "Is this how you rob me of my life while I am still at the beginning of it? For shame!" I shouted, struggling and carrying on between them, but they would not listen to me.

— "Then I too shall use force."

And I wound my arms around their waists and squeezed; they let go of me and gave a pampered, feminine shriek.

"Now I can throw you both in together," I said in a rough, victorious voice, "but I take pity on your youth and your weakness, and I will not pay you back in kind." While we were in that position, my friend Antoine appeared from behind one of the cypress trees, his face soured; Christine called out to him, and he joined us on our morning stroll. From that morning on, my friendship with those two girls grew, and I became their favored companion, lost between love of the two of them, not knowing toward which of them my heart was leading me. Whenever I was alone with one, I decided once and for all that she alone contained all the beauty there was in existence, and that she and no other possessed my affections. But my judgments crumbled and vanished the moment I was alone with the second instead of the first... A sheer weathervane I was in those days.

As for my old friend "Antoine," he astonished me by the change and reversal of his ways. He was no longer the playful, merry, dissolute young man I had known before; he had become grave, shut in upon himself, a keeper of the principles of custom and tradition. If he read a book or an article containing ideas of renewal, or views contrary to reaction, he threw the book aside and counted it worthless. If he met a girl with bare forearms strolling with a young man in some playful dalliance, he flared up against her and his soul filled with disgust. Or if he watched a motion picture whose heroine kissed two men at one time, he directed his curses

at those wreckers of morals and principles, the producers of films.

"When a man is about to marry, does he change like that?" I asked myself.

— "When do you mean to marry?" I asked him one day.

"Have you no subject but this one?" he answered me with sharp-ness and agitation. But I kept hold of my nerves: "How strange, Antoine — is it a crime if I ask you the date of your wedding?"

— "The mere question is no crime; but I am sorry when I see a cultivated young man like you possessed by his appetites, thinking of nothing but the base animal instincts!"

My friend is in a fit of madness, I said to myself; let me lie in wait and see the outcome. "But who told you that I no longer think of anything but base instincts?"

— "I read all that is in your thoughts from your tone in con-versation, from your movements plain to the eye... Think — think only of the shame and misery you bring upon that simple girl whom you tempt with your talk and your dalliance. Think of what this girl will come to in her future life. Do you not feel that you are the cause of her misery from beginning to end?"

— "Sorry — very sorry!" I brought it out with a deep sigh, shaking my head to the right and to the left.

"You ought to be sorry. Of course you ought."

— "I am sorry for one thing only: that I am the sole hearer of this sermon — this sermon that millions ought to have heard. It should have been broadcast on the radio, written in the newspapers, recited in the cinemas, taken down on phonograph records and the microphone and the..."

— "Empty talk!" my friend Antoine shouted in a fury, and vanished from before me. As for me, I stayed in my place a moment, frozen — when the dark girl passed before me and woke me from my stupor: "What has come over you? A heart attack?"

— "Yes!"

— "Poor thing... tell me what you are meditating on."

— "I am meditating on the guardian angel, on the Holy Spirit, on the apostolic blessing that has descended upon my friend Antoine..."

— "It seems you two have been through the thick of a battle. Poor Antoine — don't you know what has befallen him?"

— "What? Is there something more than the descent of the Spirit?" (I said it eagerly.)

— "He has broken the engagement and quarreled with his fiancée."

— "No... is that true? Now I know why he was so intractable in temper just now."

That evening I withdrew early to my chamber. No sooner had the clock struck eight than I heard two voices speaking in a faint whisper on the road beneath my window. My heart quickened at once and my curiosity was aroused, especially when I made out the voice of my friend Antoine and the voice of the fair Greek girl, Christine. So I slipped out of my room, driven by an unconscious force — it may have been the force of envy, or the force of curiosity, or the love of adventure, I do not know — and followed them quietly and warily until they came to an empty, open place; then I lay in wait behind a tree trunk and listened.

"And now what do you want of me, Antoine? Why have you led me here?" said the fair Greek girl. And Antoine stammered: "You know,

Christine — you know why I led

Jockey-Club

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Tatli Sert

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The Régie

Among the various brands manufactured by the Régie, the smoker is bound to try out the cigarette that suits his taste and his fancy

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