r in showers.

Without perceiving the curious smile that accompanied this young
person's curiously cordial invitation to enter, he accepted the
invitation and was shown into the salon: where he seated himself--a
left-handedness of which he would have been incapable had he been less
perturbed--in Madame Jolicoeur's own special chair. An anatomical
vagary of the Notary's meagre person was the undue shortness of his body
and the undue length of his legs. Because of this eccentricity of
proportion, his bald head rose above the back of the chair to a height
approximately identical with that of its normal occupant.

His waiting time--extending from its promised point to what seemed to
him to be a whole geographical meridian--went slowly. To relieve it,
he took a book from the table, and in a desultory manner turned the
leaves. While thus perfunctorily engaged, he heard the clicking of an
opening door, and then the sound of voices: of Madame Jolicoeur's
voice, and of a man's voice--which latter, coming nearer, he recognized
beyond all doubting as the voice of the Major Gontard. Of other voices
there was not a sound: whence the compromising fact was obvious that
the two had gone through that long dinner together, and alone! Knowing,
as he did, Madame Jolicoeur's habitual disposition toward the
convenances--willingly to be boiled in oil rather than in the smallest
particular to abrade them--he perceived that only two explanations of
the situation were possible: either she had lapsed of a sudden into
madness; or--the thought was petrifying--the Major Gontard had won out
in his French campaigning on his known conquering African lines. The
cheerfully sane tone of the lady's voice forbade him to clutch at the
poor solace to be found in the first alternative--and so forced him to
accept the second. Yielding for a moment to his emotions, the
death-whiteness of his bald head taking on a still deathlier pallor,
Monsieur Peloux buried his face in his hands and groaned.

In that moment of his obscured perception a little black personage
trotted into the salon on soundless paws. Quite possibly, in his then
overwrought condition, had Monsieur Peloux seen this personage enter he
would have shrieked--in the confident belief that before him was a cat
ghost! Pointedly, it was not a ghost. It was the happy little Shah de
Perse himself--all a-frisk with the joy of his blessed home-coming and
very much alive! Knowing, as I do, many of the myster