y at home
as she is in the best French and American circles, she hears a great
many things she'd rather not hear."

"She needn't listen to 'em."

"Unfortunately a woman in her position, with a daughter like Marion, is
obliged to listen. But that's rather the end of the story--"

"And I want the beginning, Grimston, if you don't mind. I want to know
why this Diane should be after me."

"She's after money," Mr. Grimston declared, bluntly. "She's after money,
and you'd better let me manage her. It would save you the trouble of the
refusal you'll be obliged to make."

"Well, tell me about her and I'll see."

Mr. Grimston stiffened himself in his chair and cleared his throat.

"Diane Eveleth," he stated, with slow, significant emphasis, "is an
extremely fascinating woman. She has probably turned more men round her
little finger than any other woman in Paris."

"Is that to her credit or her discredit?"

"I don't want to say anything against Mrs. Eveleth," Mr. Grimston
protested. "I wish she hadn't come near us at all. As it is, you must be
forewarned."

"I'm not particular about that, if you'll give me the facts."

"That's not so easy. Where facts are so deucedly disagreeable, a fellow
finds it hard to trot out any poor little woman in her weaknesses. I
must make it clear beforehand that I don't want to say anything against
her."

"It's in confidence--privileged, as the lawyers say. I sha'n't think the
worse of her--that is, not much."

"Poor Diane," Mr. Grimston began again, sententiously, "is one of the
bits of human wreckage that have drifted down to us from the
pre-revolutionary days of French society. Her grandfather, the old Comte
de la Ferronaise, belonged to that order of irreconcilable royalists who
persist in dashing themselves to pieces against the rising wall of
democracy. I remember him perfectly--a handsome old fellow, who had lost
an arm in the Crimea. He used to do business with us when I was with
Hargous in the rue de Provence. Having impoverished himself in a plot in
favor of the Comte de Chambord, somewhere about 1872, he came utterly to
grief in raising funds for the Boulanger craze, in the train of the
Duchesse d'Uzes. He died shortly afterward, one of the last to break his
heart over the hopeless Bourbon cause."

"That, I understand you to say, was the grandfather of the young woman
who is after money. She's a Frenchwoman, then?"

"She's half French. That was her grandfather. The fathe