a home and be a father to him," she
thought--and the tears overflowed and ran down.

Even as they fell, the door was thrown open to admit Raymond de Chelles,
and the consciousness of the moisture still glistening on her cheeks
perhaps strengthened her resolve to resist him, and thus made her more
imperiously to be desired. Certain it is that on that day her suitor
first alluded to a possibility which Madame de Trezac had prudently
refrained from suggesting, there fell upon Undine's attentive ears the
magic phrase "annulment of marriage."

Her alert intelligence immediately set to work in this new direction;
but almost at the same moment she became aware of a subtle change
of tone in the Princess and her mother, a change reflected in the
corresponding decline of Madame de Trezac's cordiality. Undine, since
her arrival in Paris, had necessarily been less in the Princess's
company, but when they met she had found her as friendly as ever. It was
manifestly not a failing of the Princess's to forget past favours, and
though increasingly absorbed by the demands of town life she treated her
new friend with the same affectionate frankness, and Undine was given
frequent opportunities to enlarge her Parisian acquaintance, not only in
the Princess's intimate circle but in the majestic drawing-rooms of the
Hotel de Dordogne. Now, however, there was a perceptible decline in
these signs of hospitality, and Undine, on calling one day on the
Duchess, noticed that her appearance sent a visible flutter of
discomfort through the circle about her hostess's chair. Two or three of
the ladies present looked away from the new-comer and at each other,
and several of them seemed spontaneously to encircle without approaching
her, while another--grey-haired, elderly and slightly frightened--with
an "Adieu, ma bonne tante" to the Duchess, was hastily aided in her
retreat down the long line of old gilded rooms.

The incident was too mute and rapid to have been noticeable had it not
been followed by the Duchess's resuming her conversation with the ladies
nearest her as though Undine had just gone out of the room instead of
entering it. The sense of having been thus rendered invisible filled
Undine with a vehement desire to make herself seen, and an equally
strong sense that all attempts to do so would be vain; and when, a few
minutes later, she issued from the portals of the Hotel de Dordogne it
was with the fixed resolve not to enter them again til