y, bending forward:

"Mr. Melrose, I have come to speak to you on behalf of your wife."

"So I imagined. I should not allow any one else, Lady Tatham, to address
me on the subject."

"Thank you. I resolved--as you see--to appeal once more to our old--"

"Friendship?" he suggested.

"Yes--friendship," she repeated, slowly. "It might have been called
so--once."

"Long ago! So long ago that--I do not see how anything practical can come
of appealing to it," he said, pointedly. "Moreover, the manner in which
the friendship was trampled on--by you--not once, but twice, not only
destroyed it, but--if I may say so--replaced it."

His hollow eyes burned upon her. Wrapped in his cloak, his white hair
gleamimg amid the wonderful ewers and dishes, he had the aspect of some
wizard or alchemist, of whom a woman might ask poison for her rival, or a
philter for her lover. Victoria, fascinated, was held partly by the
apparition before her, partly by an image--a visualization in the mind.
She saw the ballroom in that splendid house, now the British Embassy in
Paris, and once the home of Pauline Borghese. She saw herself in white, a
wreath of forget-me-nots in her hair. She has just heard, and from a
woman friend, a story of lust and cruelty in which Edmund Melrose was the
principal actor. He comes to claim her for a dance; she dismisses him, in
public, with a manner and in words that scathe--that brand. She sees his
look of rage, as of one struck in the face--she feels again the shudder
passing through her--a shudder of release, horror passing into
thanksgiving.

But--what long tracts of life since then!--what happiness for her!--what
decay and degeneracy for him! A pang of sheer pity, not so much for him
as for the human lot, shot through her, as she realized afresh to what
evening of life he had come, from what a morning.

At any rate her manner in reply showed no resentment of his tone.

"All these things are dead for both of us," she said quietly.

He interrupted her.

"You are right--or partly right. Edith is dead--that makes it easier for
you and me to meet."

"Yes. Edith is dead," she said, with sudden emotion. "And in her last
days she spoke to me kindly of you."

He made no comment. She resumed:

"I desire, if I can--and if you will allow me--to recall to you the years
when we were cousins and friends together--blotting out all that has
happened since. If you remember--twenty years ago, when you and your wife