uets of swelling blue and pink hydrangia nestled at his feet
on shaven grass. An open window showed a cloth of colour, as in a
reminiscence of Italy.

Beauchamp heard himself addressed:--'You are looking for my
sister-in-law, M. Beauchamp?'

The speaker was Madame d'Auffray, to whom he had been introduced
overnight--a lady of the aquiline French outline, not ungentle.

Renee had spoken affectionately of her, he remembered. There was nothing
to make him be on his guard, and he stated that he was looking for
Madame de Rouaillout, and did not conceal surprise at the information
that she was out on horseback.

'She is a tireless person,' Madame d'Auffray remarked. 'You will not
miss her long. We all meet at twelve, as you know.'

'I grudge an hour, for I go to-morrow,' said Beauchamp.

The notification of so early a departure, or else his bluntness,
astonished her. She fell to praising Renee's goodness. He kept her to it
with lively interrogations, in the manner of a guileless boy urging
for eulogies of his dear absent friend. Was it duplicity in him or
artlessness?

'Has she, do you think, increased in beauty?' Madame d'Auffray inquired:
an insidious question, to which he replied:

'Once I thought it would be impossible.'

Not so bad an answer for an Englishman, in a country where speaking is
fencing; the race being little famous for dialectical alertness: but was
it artful or simple?

They skirted the chateau, and Beauchamp had the history of Dame
Philiberte recounted to him, with a mixture of Gallic irony, innuendo,
openness, touchingness, ridicule, and charity novel to his ears. Madame
d'Auffray struck the note of intimacy earlier than is habitual. She
sounded him in this way once or twice, carelessly perusing him, and
waiting for the interesting edition of the Book of Man to summarize
its character by showing its pages or remaining shut. It was done
delicately, like the tap of a finger-nail on a vase. He rang clear; he
had nothing to conceal; and where he was reserved, that is, in speaking
of the developed beauty and grace of Renee, he was transparent. She read
the sort of man he was; she could also hazard a guess as to the man's
present state. She ventured to think him comparatively harmless--for the
hour: for she was not the woman to be hoodwinked by man's dark nature
because she inclined to think well of a particular man; nor was she
one to trust to any man subject to temptation. The wisdom of the
Frenc