eam, and
said slowly:--

"No; of a man."

Then, noticing my increasing interest, "Monsieur would know something of
madame?"

He held up his hand, and began crooking one finger after another as he
recounted her history. These bent keys, it seemed, unlocked secrets as
well.

"Le voila! the drama of Madame la Baronne! The play opens when she is
first a novice in the convent of Saint Ursula, devoted to good works and
the church. Next you find her a grand dame and rich, the wife of Baron
Alphonse de Frontignac, first secretary of legation at Vienna. Then a
mother with one child,--a boy, now six or seven years old, who is hardly
ever out of her arms." He stopped, toyed for a moment with his match-safe,
slipped it into his pocket, and said carelessly, "So much for Act I."

Then, after a pause during which he traced again little diagrams in the
gravel, he said suddenly:--

"Does this really interest you, monsieur?"

"Unquestionably."

"You know her, then?" This with a glance of suspicion as keen as it was
unexpected by me.

"Never saw her in my life before," I answered frankly, "and never shall
again. I leave for Paris to-day, and sail from Havre on Saturday."

He drew in the point of his cane, looked me all over with one of those
comprehensive sweeps of the eye, as if he would read my inmost thought,
and then, with an expression of confidence born doubtless of my evident
sincerity, continued:--

"In the next act Frontignac gets mixed up in some banking scandals,--he
would, like a fool, play roulette--baccarat was always his strong
game,--disappears from Vienna, is arrested at the frontier, escapes, and
is found the next morning under a brush-heap with a bullet through his
head. This ends the search. Two years later--this is now Act III.--Madame
la Baronne, without a sou to her name, is hard at work in the hospitals of
Metz. The child is pensioned out near by.

"Now comes the grand romance. An officer attached to the 13th
Cuirassiers--a regiment with not men enough left after Metz to muster a
company--is picked up for dead, with one arm torn off, and a sabre-slash
over his head, and brought to her ward. She nurses him back to life, inch
by inch, and in six months he joins his regiment. Now please follow the
plot. It is quite interesting. Is it not easy to see what will happen?
Tender and beautiful, young and brave! Vive le bel amour! It is the old
story, but it is also une affaire de coeur--la grande passion. In