ening Madame Olenska
twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one
day actually converse with each other from street to street, or
even--incredible dream!--from one town to another. This struck from
all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes
as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are
talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it
would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the
telephone carried them safely back to the big house.

Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and
walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess
Olenska indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens
encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine,
and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more
than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to
his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to
spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with
whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.

Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the
long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had
only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and
childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more
permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in
his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly
flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities
displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist
them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her
departure no more than a manoeuvre.

Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of
Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face,
and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and
even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all, if this
were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the
express purpose of meeting him? If she had done that, she ceased to be
an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of
dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with