estions concerning the sweetmeat trade. Why, even
Coxeter became interested in spite of himself, for the Jew was an
intelligent man, and as he talked on Coxeter learned with surprise that
there is a romantic and exciting side even to making sweets.

"What a pity it is," he heard Nan say at last in her low, even voice,
"that you can't now come back to England and settle down there. Surely
it would make your mother much happier, and you don't seem to like Paris
so very much?"

"That is true," said the man, "but--well, unluckily there's an obstacle
to my doing that----"

Coxeter looked up from his paper. The stranger's face had become
troubled, preoccupied, and his eyes were fixed, or so Coxeter fancied
them to be, on Nan Archdale's left hand, the slender bare hand on which
the only ring was her wedding ring.

Coxeter once more returned to his paper, but for some minutes he made no
attempt to follow the dancing lines of print.

"I trust you won't be offended if I ask whether you are, or are not, a
married lady?" The sweetmeat man's voice had a curious note of shamed
interrogation threading itself through the words.

Coxeter felt surprised and rather shocked. This was what came of
allowing oneself to become familiar with an underbred stranger! But Nan
had apparently not so taken the impertinent question, for, "I am a
widow," Coxeter heard her answer gently, in a voice that had no touch of
offence in it.

And then, after a few moments, staring with frowning eyes at the
spread-out sheet of newspaper before him, Coxeter, with increasing
distaste and revolt, became aware that Mrs. Archdale was now receiving
very untoward confidences--confidences which Coxeter had always imagined
were never made save under the unspoken seal of secrecy by one man to
another. This objectionable stranger was telling Nan Archdale the story
of the woman who had seen him off at the station, and whose absurd
phrase, "_Adieu, mon petit homme adore_," had rung so unpleasantly in
his, Coxeter's, ears.

The eavesdropper was well aware that such stories are among the everyday
occurrences of life, but his knowledge was largely theoretical; John
Coxeter was not the sort of man to whom other men are willing to confide
their shames, sorrows, or even successes in a field of which the
aftermath is generally bitter.

In as far as such a tale can be told with decent ambiguity it was so
told by this man of whose refinement Coxeter had formed so poor an
o