e people who presume too much upon a short acquaintance--and our
acquaintance has been very, very short, hasn't it? even though we may
have heard a great deal about each other beforehand. I wonder--"

"Oh, I should ask it if I were you!" said Ste. Marie, at once. "I'm an
extremely good-natured person. And, besides, I quite naturally feel
flattered at your taking interest enough to ask anything about me."

"Well," said she, "it's this: Why does everybody call you just 'Ste.
Marie'? Most people are spoken of as Monsieur this or that--if there
isn't a more august title; but they all call you Ste. Marie without any
Monsieur. It seems rather odd."

Ste. Marie looked puzzled. "Why," he said, "I don't believe I know,
just. I'd never thought of that. It's quite true, of course. They never
do use a Monsieur or anything, do they? How cheeky of them! I wonder why
it is? I'll ask Hartley."

He did ask Hartley later on, and Hartley didn't know, either. Miss
Benham asked some other people, who were vague about it, and in the end
she became convinced that it was an odd and quite inexplicable form of
something like endearment. But nobody seemed to have formulated it to
himself.

"The name is really 'De Ste. Marie,'" he went on, "and there's a title
that I don't use, and a string of Christian names that one never
employs. My people were Bearnais, and there's a heap of ruins on top of
a hill in the Pyrenees where they lived. It used to be Ste. Marie de
Mont-les-Roses, but afterward, after the Revolution, they called it Ste.
Marie de Mont Perdu. My great-grandfather was killed there, but some old
servants smuggled his little son away and saved him."

He seemed to Miss Benham to say that in exactly the right manner, not in
the cheap and scoffing fashion which some young men affect in speaking
of ancestral fortunes or misfortunes, nor with too much solemnity. And
when she allowed a little silence to occur at the end, he did not go on
with his family history, but turned at once to another subject. It
pleased her curiously.

The fair youth at her other side continued to crouch over his food,
making fierce and animal-like noises. He never spoke or seemed to wish
to be spoken to, and Miss Benham found it easy to ignore him altogether.
It occurred to her once or twice that Ste. Marie's other neighbor might
desire an occasional word from him, but, after all, she said to herself
that was his affair and beyond her control. So these two talke