ely curiosity
on the subject of Lady Henry's companion. Thanks to a remarkable
physical resemblance, he was practically certain that he had guessed the
secret of Mademoiselle Le Breton's parentage. At any rate, on the
supposition that he had, his thoughts began to occupy themselves with
the story to which his guess pointed.

Some thirty years before, he had known, both in London and in Italy, a
certain Colonel Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the
favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She
was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those
natures--sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge
life--which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be
balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his
military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a strict
Anglicanism that seemed to carry with it innumerable "shalts" and "shalt
nots," disagreeable to the natural man or woman, soon found her a tiring
and trying companion. She asked him for what he could not give; she
coquetted with questions he thought it impious to raise; the persons she
made friends with were distasteful to him; and, without complaining, he
soon grew to think it intolerable that a woman married to a soldier
should care so little for his professional interests and ambitions.
Though when she pretended to care for them she annoyed him, if possible,
still more.

As for Lady Rose, she went through all the familiar emotions of the
_femme incomprise_. And with the familiar result. There presently
appeared in the house a man of good family, thirty-five or so,
traveller, painter, and dreamer, with fine, long-drawn features bronzed
by the sun of the East, and bringing with him the reputation of having
plotted and fought for most of the "lost causes" of our generation,
including several which had led him into conflict with British
authorities and British officials. To Colonel Delaney he was an
"agitator," if not a rebel; and the careless pungency of his talk soon
classed him as an atheist besides. In the case of Lady Rose, this man's
free and generous nature, his independence of money and convention, his
passion for the things of the mind, his contempt for the mode, whether
in dress or politics, his light evasions of the red tape of life as of
something that no one could reasonably expect of a vagabond like
himself--these things presently transformed a woman in despa