toward the broader avenues leading to the
canals. The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some
drifting cloud, like dashes of foam. The trees about them lifted dark
velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and
flowers.

"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs.
Falconer. "Isn't it _too_ beautiful!"

"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to
say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories
of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because
he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys,
and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of
no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.

THE THIRD ADVENTURE

III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June,
Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not
an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world
wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in
their own country--but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming
rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and
where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made
him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.

On the very first day he went over the Hotel Montensier from _grenier_
to _caves_, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de
Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the
hotel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around
him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the
house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that
Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked,
"that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if
cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, _mon
cher_, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not
think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all
afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why,
your coat alone--the cut of it--" Montensier had laughed, "speaks of
Poole with a Boston compromise!

The Duc had been in the United States--moreover, the Frenchman had
plans of his own and he wanted very much t