s if I were walking up and down in the
Armory, in the Tower of London! My dear boy, don't think me a vulgar
brute for hinting at it, but you may depend upon it, all they wanted
was your money. I know something about that; I can tell when people
want one's money! Why they stopped wanting yours I don't know; I suppose
because they could get some one else's without working so hard for it.
It isn't worth finding out. It may be that it was not Madame de Cintre
that backed out first, very likely the old woman put her up to it. I
suspect she and her mother are really as thick as thieves, eh? You are
well out of it, my boy; make up your mind to that. If I express myself
strongly it is all because I love you so much; and from that point of
view I may say I should as soon have thought of making up to that piece
of pale high-mightiness as I should have thought of making up to the
Obelisk in the Place des la Concorde."

Newman sat gazing at Tristram during this harangue with a lack-lustre
eye; never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely
the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram. Mrs. Tristram's glance
at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a slightly
lurid smile. "You must at least do justice," she said, "to the felicity
with which Mr. Tristram repairs the indiscretions of a too zealous
wife."

But even without the aid of Tom Tristram's conversational felicities,
Newman would have begun to think of the Bellegardes again. He could
cease to think of them only when he ceased to think of his loss and
privation, and the days had as yet but scantily lightened the weight
of this incommodity. In vain Mrs. Tristram begged him to cheer up; she
assured him that the sight of his countenance made her miserable.

"How can I help it?" he demanded with a trembling voice. "I feel like
a widower--and a widower who has not even the consolation of going to
stand beside the grave of his wife--who has not the right to wear so
much mourning as a weed on his hat. I feel," he added in a moment "as if
my wife had been murdered and her assassins were still at large."

Mrs. Tristram made no immediate rejoinder, but at last she said, with
a smile which, in so far as it was a forced one, was less successfully
simulated than such smiles, on her lips, usually were; "Are you very
sure that you would have been happy?"

Newman stared a moment, and then shook his head. "That's weak," he said;
"that won't do."