nd say so!'

The excitement with which Fenwick spoke made it evident that Watson
had touched an extremely sore point.

Watson was silent a little, lit another cigarette, and then said, with
a smile:

'Poor Madame de Pastourelles!'

Fenwick looked up with irritation.

'What on earth do you mean?'

'I am wondering how she kept the peace between you--her two great
friends.'

'She sees very little of Welby.'

'Ah! Since when?'

'Oh! for a long time. Of course they meet occasionally--'

A big, kindly smile flickered over Watson's face.

'What--was little Madame Welby jealous?'

'She would be a great goose if she were,' said Fenwick, turning aside
to look through some sketches that lay on a chair beside him.

Watson shook his head, still smiling, then remarked:

'By the way, I understand she has become quite an invalid.'

'Has she?' said Fenwick. 'I know nothing of them.'

Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed
the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked
of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre,' and the Goncourts, as they compared
the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest
phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and
tendencies--Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan,
loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir
recently opened at a Paris dealer's--Watson's inner mind was really
full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that _salon_ of hers in the
old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years
Fenwick had made one of the principal figures. It should perhaps
be explained that some two years after Fenwick's arrival in London,
Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little
_menage_ of her own, distinct from the household in St. James's
Square. Her friends and her stepmother's were not always congenial to
each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier
for the change. Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the
meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society. Watson himself,
indeed, had never been an _habitue_ of that or any other drawing-room.
As he had told Lord Findon long ago, he was not for the world, nor the
world for him. But whereas his volatile lordship could never draw him
from his cell, Lord Findon's daughter was sometimes irresistible, and
Watson's great shaggy head and ungainly person was occasionally to