--yes, very suddenly, taking with them but little luggage, and
they had left her--she had the honor of being the femme de chambre of
ces dames--to put up their remaining possessions and follow as soon
as possible. On Bernard's expressing surprise and saying that he had
supposed them to be fixed at the sea-side for the rest of the season,
the femme de chambre, who seemed a very intelligent person, begged to
remind him that the season was drawing to a close, that Madame had taken
the chalet but for five weeks, only ten days of which period were yet to
expire, that ces dames, as Monsieur perhaps knew, were great travellers,
who had been half over the world and thought nothing of breaking camp
at an hour's notice, and that, in fine, Madame might very well have
received a telegram summoning her to another part of the country.

"And where have the ladies gone?" asked Bernard.

"For the moment, to Paris."

"And in Paris where have they gone?"

"Dame, chez elles--to their house," said the femme de chambre, who
appeared to think that Bernard asked too many questions.

But Bernard persisted.

"Where is their house?"

The waiting-maid looked at him from head to foot.

"If Monsieur wishes to write, many of Madame's letters come to her
banker," she said, inscrutably.

"And who is her banker?"

"He lives in the Rue de Provence."

"Very good--I will find him out," said our hero, turning away.

The discriminating reader who has been so good as to interest himself
in this little narrative will perhaps at this point exclaim with a
pardonable consciousness of shrewdness: "Of course he went the next day
to the Rue de Provence!" Of course, yes; only as it happens Bernard did
nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he ever did
in his life--a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with regard
to which he often afterward wondered whence he had drawn the ability
for so remarkable a feat--he simply spent a fortnight at
Blanquais-les-Galets. It was a very quiet fortnight; he spoke to no one,
he formed no relations, he was company to himself. It may be added that
he had never found his own company half so good. He struck himself as
a reasonable, delicate fellow, who looked at things in such a way as
to make him refrain--refrain successfully, that was the point--from
concerning himself practically about Angela Vivian. His saying that
he would find out the banker in the Rue de Provence had been for the
benefi