g, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been
alone--Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the
_entresol_ into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating.
Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that
praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to
practise--in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest--only to
accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy
himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those
rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her
servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of
information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about
that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather
agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble
rooms of the first floor--once more taking note of their costly
furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and
again in their many mirrors--and later, near sundown, when she walked
the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest
suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained
to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it
was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and
thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only
desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he
entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and
consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all
permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe,
watchful, fierce as a she-panther--her ears strained to hear, her eyes
to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to
remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled
passion, as with whips.

Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture.
A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered
curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous
croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking
beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her
path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers,
sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the
flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white
road--bordered by