k he made her out from a distance, arrested there alone and leaning
against the low wall. In his momentary hesitation to approach her there
was almost a shade of trepidation, but his curiosity was not chilled by
such a measure of the effect of a quarter of an hour's acquaintance. She
at once recovered their connexion, on his drawing near, and showed
it with the frankness of a person unprovided with a great choice of
contacts. Her dress, her expression, were the same as before; her charm
came out like that of fine music on a second hearing. She soon made
conversation easy by asking him for news of Mrs. Draper. Longmore told
her that he was daily expecting news and after a pause mentioned the
promised note of introduction.

"It seems less necessary now," he said--"for me at least. But for you--I
should have liked you to know the good things our friend would probably
have been able to say about me."

"If it arrives at last," she answered, "you must come and see me and
bring it. If it doesn't you must come without it."

Then, as she continued to linger through the thickening twilight, she
explained that she was waiting for her husband, who was to arrive in the
train from Paris and who often passed along the terrace on his way home.
Longmore well remembered that Mrs. Draper had spoken of uneasy things
in her life, and he found it natural to guess that this same husband was
the source of them. Edified by his six months in Paris, "What else is
possible," he put it, "for a sweet American girl who marries an unholy
foreigner?"

But this quiet dependence on her lord's return rather shook his
shrewdness, and it received a further check from the free confidence
with which she turned to greet an approaching figure. Longmore
distinguished in the fading light a stoutish gentleman, on the fair side
of forty, in a high grey hat, whose countenance, obscure as yet against
the quarter from which it came, mainly presented to view the large
outward twist of its moustache. M. de Mauves saluted his wife with
punctilious gallantry and, having bowed to Longmore, asked her several
questions in French. Before taking his offered arm to walk to their
carriage, which was in waiting at the gate of the terrace, she
introduced our hero as a friend of Mrs. Draper and also a fellow
countryman, whom she hoped they might have the pleasure of seeing, as
she said, chez eux. M. de Mauves responded briefly, but civilly, in fair
English, and led his wife awa