er side of
the Atlantic!"

She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard,
and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her
lips, breathed behind it: "By the Count himself--my poor, mad, foolish
Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms."

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed, springing up.

"You are horrified? Yes, of course; I understand. I don't defend poor
Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend. He does not
defend himself--he casts himself at her feet: in my person." She
tapped her emaciated bosom. "I have his letter here."

"A letter?--Has Madame Olenska seen it?" Archer stammered, his brain
whirling with the shock of the announcement.

The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly. "Time--time; I must have
time. I know my Ellen--haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade
unforgiving?"

"But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that
hell--"

"Ah, yes," the Marchioness acquiesced. "So she describes it--my
sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may
stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up?
Those roses there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the
open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels--historic
pearls: the Sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing for all
these! Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I
always have; and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless
furniture, music, brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear young man,
if you'll excuse me, is what you've no conception of here! And she had
it all; and the homage of the greatest. She tells me she is not
thought handsome in New York--good heavens! Her portrait has been
painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the
privilege. Are these things nothing? And the remorse of an adoring
husband?"

As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an
expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer's
mirth had he not been numb with amazement.

He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first
sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger
of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him
to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just
escaped.

"She knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly.