d the sooner the better.
Leave your shopgirls and distressed needlewomen, and all your other
good works for a still better one--namely for me. Come and reclaim, and
comfort, and support me for a while in Paris."

Again she kissed the soft cheek.

"I am as good as gold. I am just now actually mawkish with virtue," she
murmured, between the kisses.

Richard witnessed this exceedingly pretty leave-taking not without a
movement of impatience. The fog was thickening once more. It grew late.
He wished his cousin would get through with these amenities. Then,
moreover, he did not covet intercourse with Miss St. Quentin. He pulled
the fur rug aside with his left hand, holding reins and whip in his
right.

"I say, are you nearly ready?" he asked. "I don't want to bother you;
but really it's about time we were moving."

"I come, I come," Madame de Vallorbes cried, in answer. She put one
neatly-shod foot on the axle, and stepped up--Richard holding out his
hand to steady her. A sense, at once pleasurable and defiant, of
something akin to ownership, came over him as he did so. Just then his
attention was claimed by a voice addressing him from the further side
of the carriage. Honoria St. Quentin stood on the gravel close beside
him, bare-headed, in the clinging damp and chill of the fog.

"Give my love to Lady Calmady," she said. "I hope I shall see her again
some day. But, even if I never have the luck to do that, in a way it'll
make no real difference. I've written her name in my private calendar,
and shall always remember it."--She paused a moment. "We got rather
near each other somehow, I think. We didn't dawdle or beat about the
bush, but went straight along, passed the initial stages of
acquaintance in a few hours, and reached that point of friendship where
forgetting becomes impossible.

"My mother never forgets," Richard asserted, and there was, perhaps, a
slight edge to his tone. Looking down into the girl's pale,
finely-moulded face, meeting the glance of those steady, strangely
clear and observant eyes, he received an impression of something
uncompromisingly sincere and in a measure protective. This, for cause
unknown, he resented. Notwithstanding her high breeding. Miss St.
Quentin's attitude appeared to him a trifle intrusive just then.

"I am very sure of that--that your mother never forgets, I mean. One
knows, at once, one can trust her down to the ground and on to the end
of the ages."--Again she paused, as