t. "If I
desired you so to do?" she inquired, and added: "I love the fragrance of
it."

He raised his brows. "Fragrance?" quoth he. "My Lady Ostermore has
another word for it." He took the pipe and jar from her. "'Tis no
humoring, this, of a man you imagine sick--no silly chivalry of yours?"
he questioned doubtfully. "Did I think that, I'd never smoke another
pipe again."

She shook her head, and laughed at his solemnity. "I love the
fragrance," she repeated.

"Ah! Why, then, I'll pleasure you," said he, with the air of one
conferring favors, and filled his pipe. Presently he spoke again in a
musing tone. "In a week or so, I shall be well enough to travel."

"'Tis your intent to travel?" she inquired.

He set down the jar, and reached for the tinderbox. "It is time I was
returning home," he explained.

"Ah, yes. Your home is in France."

"At Maligny; the sweetest nook in Normandy. 'Twas my mother's
birthplace, and 'twas there she died."

"You have felt the loss of her, I make no doubt."

"That might have been the case if I had known her," answered he. "But
as it is, I never did. I was but two years old--she, herself, but
twenty--when she died."

He pulled at his pipe in silence a moment or two, his face overcast and
thoughtful. A shallower woman would have broken in with expressions of
regret; Hortensia offered him the nobler sympathy of silence. Moreover,
she had felt from his tone that there was more to come; that what he
had said was but the preface to some story that he desired her to be
acquainted with. And presently, as she expected, he continued.

"She died, Mistress Winthrop, of a broken heart. My father had abandoned
her two years and more before she died. In those years of repining--ay,
and worse, of actual want--her health was broken so that, poor soul, she
died."

"O pitiful!" cried Hortensia, pain in her face.

"Pitiful, indeed--the more pitiful that her death was a source of some
slight happiness to those who loved her; the only happiness they could
have in her was to know that she was at rest."

"And--and your father?"

"I am coming to him. My mother had a friend--a very noble, lofty-minded
gentleman who had loved her with a great and honest love before the
profligate who was my father came forward as a suitor. Recognizing in
the latter--as he thought in his honest heart--a man in better case to
make her happy, this gentleman I speak of went his ways. He came upon
her afterwards, brok