lent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and
she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had
not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid
creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to
profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely,
she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up
her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time,
she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the
garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was
entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache
and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round
the house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as
they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some
old-fashioned epigram about "la vieille galanterie francaise"--then by
a sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was
doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to
come in. "I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at
Saint-Germain."

For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his
time not being wasted, but it expired before the simple sincerity of
her look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of
disinterestedness, and it seemed to him he should insult her by treating
her words as a bait for flattery. "I shall start in a day or two," he
answered, "but I won't promise you not to come back."

"I hope not," she said simply. "I expect to be here a long time."

"I shall come and say good-bye," he returned--which she appeared to
accept with a smile as she went in.

He stood a moment, then walked slowly homeward by the terrace. It seemed
to him that to leave her thus, for a gain on which she herself insisted,
was to know her better and admire her more. But he was aware of a vague
ferment of feeling which her evasion of his question half an hour before
had done more to deepen than to allay. In the midst of it suddenly, on
the great terrace of the Chateau, he encountered M. de Mauves, planted
there against the parapet and finishing a cigar. The Count, who, he
thought he made out, had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his
white plump hand. Longmore stoppe