so touched with morning
freshness. The party was not yet complete, and he felt a movement of
annoyance when he recognized, in the last person to join it, a Russian
lady of cosmopolitan notoriety whom he had run across in his unmarried
days, and as to whom he had already warned Undine. Knowing what
strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the
watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the Baroness
Adelschein was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of
his wife's intimate circle.

When the excursionists had started he turned back to his writing-table
and tried to take up his work; but he could not fix his thoughts:
they were far away, in pursuit of Undine. He had been but five months
married, and it seemed, after all, rather soon for him to be dropped out
of such excursions as unquestioningly as poor Harvey Shallum. He smiled
away this first twinge of jealousy, but the irritation it left found
a pretext in his displeasure at Undine's choice of companions. Mrs.
Shallum grated on his taste, but she was as open to inspection as
a shop-window, and he was sure that time would teach his wife the
cheapness of what she had to show. Roviano and the Englishmen were well
enough too: frankly bent on amusement, but pleasant and well-bred. But
they would naturally take their tone from the women they were with;
and Madame Adelschein's tone was notorious. He knew also that Undine's
faculty of self-defense was weakened by the instinct of adapting herself
to whatever company she was in, of copying "the others" in speech and
gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress; and he was disturbed
by the thought of what her ignorance might expose her to.

She came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and
mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the
look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally
left out of the party.

"You've been gone forever. Was it the Adelschein who made you go such
lengths?" he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone.

Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on
him the light of her guileless gaze.

"I don't know: everybody was amusing. The Marquis is awfully bright."

"I'd no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to
take her off with you in that way."

Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock's-feathers in her