e must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at,
the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people
she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,
images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a
setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young
Frenchman who had once said to him: "Ah, good conversation--there is
nothing like it, is there?"

Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty
years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame
Olenska's existence. More than half a lifetime divided them, and she
had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society
he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly
understand. During that time he had been living with his youthful
memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible
companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something
apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim
chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....

They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of
the thoroughfares flanking the building. It was a quiet quarter, after
all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one
an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this
were left to the few and the indifferent.

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by
a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square
into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

"It must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with
a movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood
together looking up at the house.

It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but
many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured
front. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the
rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were
still lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

"I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
porte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to
say: "The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings."

Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end
of their pilgrimage had been attained.

"I say, you know, it's ne