year over! Ah, there was
never another like him! You could never know, Katrine, how different he
was from others."

"It was long ago?" Katrine asked.

"Thirty years. Dermott has recently been demanding papers of me. It
seems there may be some property in America belonging to my first
husband which he can claim for me."

A premonition of the truth came to Katrine at the sound of Dermott's
name.

"And your first husband's name?" she inquired. "Will it pain you to tell
it?"

"Not at all," the Countess answered, with a sad smile. "It was Francis
Ravenel."

The sound of the name itself brought no shock to Katrine. She seemed to
have heard it before it was spoken, but she made no sign.

She knew it was Frank's father of whom Madame de Nemours spoke, and the
tales of him in North Carolina had more than prepared her for wild
doings in his student days. It seemed strange, however, that Frank had
never spoken of an early marriage of his father. But the more she
thought of it, the firmer became her belief that he had never known it.

It was not until the gray of the following morning that she comprehended
to the full the weighty significance of Madame de Nemours' early
marriage, and saw clearly the significance of Dermott's stay in
Carolina, with the direful resulting that might come to Frank from the
Irishman's investigations there.

"If Frank's father married in America, with a wife and child living in
France--" But here Katrine stopped in her thinking, putting the idea
from her mind as one too horrid to entertain.

The second apparently disconnected event which led by a circuitous route
to the death of Madame de Nemours, as well as to the discovery of that
missing witness for whom McDermott long had searched, was announced
quietly by the Countess herself one morning of the following May.

Looking up from the Paris _Herald_, she said to Katrine, "I see that
Anne Lennox has leased the old Latour Place in the Boulevard Haussmann
for an indefinite period."

The three months following the coming of Mrs. Lennox made no change in
their lives whatever. Katrine was aware that Madame de Nemours and Anne
exchanged visits of courtesy, each missing the other, but early in July
she went with the Countess and Josef to Brittany and spent the summer in
work, the world forgetting and by the world forgot.

And the divine days with Josef by the sea! His wisdom, his temper, his
splendid intolerance, his prophetic imaginings, as