dy saluted me in turn ceremoniously and in silence.

'Is there no one else here who should know you?' M. de Rosny continued,
in a tone almost of persiflage, and with the same change in his voice
which had struck me before; but now it was more marked. 'If not, M. de
Marsac, I am afraid--But first look round, look round, sir; I would not
judge any man hastily.'

He laid his hand on my shoulder as he finished in a manner so familiar
and so utterly at variance with his former bearing that I doubted if I
heard or felt aright. Yet I looked mechanically at the lady, and seeing
that her eyes glistened in the firelight, and that she gazed at me very
kindly, I wondered still more; falling, indeed, into a very confusion
of amazement. This was not lessened but augmented a hundredfold when,
turning in obedience to the pressure of de Rosny's hand, I saw beside
me, as if she had risen from the floor, another lady--no other than
Mademoiselle de la Vire herself! She had that moment stepped out of the
shadow of the great fireplace, which had hitherto hidden her, and stood
before me curtseying prettily, with the same look on her face and in her
eyes which madame's wore.

'Mademoiselle!' I muttered, unable to take my eyes from her.

'Mais oui, monsieur, mademoiselle,' she answered, curtseying lower, with
the air of a child rather than a woman.

'Here?' I stammered, my mouth open, my eyes staring.

'Here, sir--thanks to the valour of a brave man,' she answered, speaking
in a voice so low I scarcely heard her. And then, dropping her eyes,
she stepped back into the shadow, as if either she had said too much
already, or doubted her composure were she to say more. She was so
radiantly dressed, she looked in the firelight more like a fairy than
a woman, being of small and delicate proportions; and she seemed in
my eyes so different a person, particularly in respect of the softened
expression of her features, from the Mademoiselle de la Vire whom I had
known and seen plunged in sloughs and bent to the saddle with fatigue,
that I doubted still if I had seen aright, and was as far from
enlightenment as before.

It was M. de Rosny himself who relieved me from the embarrassment I was
suffering. He embraced me in the most kind and obliging manner, and this
more than once; begging me to pardon the deception he had practised upon
me, and to which he had been impelled partly by the odd nature of our
introduction at the inn, and partly by his desir