s, "that the man was her lover? He
might have been her brother or some other relative."

"That," said Marshfield, with his little flat laugh, "I happen to have
ascertained--and, curiously enough, only a few weeks ago. It was at the
play, between the acts, from my comfortable seat (the first row in the
pit). I was looking leisurely round the house when I caught sight of a
woman, in a box close by, whose head was turned from me, and who presented
the somewhat unusual spectacle of a young neck and shoulders of the most
exquisite contour--and perfectly gray hair; and not dull gray, but rather
of a pleasing tint like frosted silver. This aroused my curiosity. I
brought my glasses to a focus on her and waited patiently till she turned
round. Then I recognized the Baroness Kassowski, and I no longer wondered
at the young hair being white.

"Yet she looked placid and happy; strangely so, it seemed to me, under the
sudden reviving in my memory of such scenes as I have now described. But
presently I understood further: beside her, in close attendance, was the
man of the sledge, a handsome fellow with much of a military air about
him.

"During the course of the evening, as I watched, I saw a friend of mine
come into the box, and at the end I slipped out into the passage to catch
him as he came out.

"'Who is the woman with the white hair?' I asked. Then, in the fragmentary
style approved of by ultra-fashionable young men--this earnest-languid
mode of speech presents curious similarities in all languages--he told me:
'Most charming couple in London--awfully pretty, wasn't she?--he had been
in the Guards--attache at Vienna once--they adored each other. White hair,
devilish queer, wasn't it? Suited her, somehow. And then she had been
married to a Russian, or something, somewhere in the wilds, and their
names were--' But do you know," said Marshfield, interrupting himself, "I
think I had better let you find that out for yourselves, if you care."

Stanley J. Weyman

_The Fowl in the Pot_

_An Episode Adapted from the Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of
Sully_

What I am going to relate may seem to some merely to be curious and on a
party with the diverting story of M. Boisrose, which I have set down in an
earlier part of my memoirs. But among the calumnies of those who have
never ceased to attack me since the death of the late king, the statement
that I kept from his majesty things which should have reach