d; "you have come back too soon." He sat down and
asked about her husband and her children, tried even to inquire about
Miss Dora Finch. In the midst of this--"Do you know where she is?" he
asked, abruptly.

Mrs. Tristram hesitated a moment; of course he couldn't mean Miss Dora
Finch. Then she answered, properly: "She has gone to the other house--in
the Rue d'Enfer." After Newman had sat a while longer looking very
sombre, she went on: "You are not so good a man as I thought. You are
more--you are more--"

"More what?" Newman asked.

"More unforgiving."

"Good God!" cried Newman; "do you expect me to forgive?"

"No, not that. I have forgiven, so of course you can't. But you might
forget! You have a worse temper about it than I should have expected.
You look wicked--you look dangerous."

"I may be dangerous," he said; "but I am not wicked. No, I am not
wicked." And he got up to go. Mrs. Tristram asked him to come back to
dinner; but he answered that he did not feel like pledging himself to
be present at an entertainment, even as a solitary guest. Later in the
evening, if he should be able, he would come.

He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took
the direction of the Rue d'Enfer. The day had the softness of early
spring; but the weather was gray and humid. Newman found himself in a
part of Paris which he little knew--a region of convents and prisons, of
streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by a few wayfarers.
At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the
Carmelites--a dull, plain edifice, with a high-shouldered blank wall
all round it. From without Newman could see its upper windows, its steep
roof and its chimneys. But these things revealed no symptoms of human
life; the place looked dumb, deaf, inanimate. The pale, dead, discolored
wall stretched beneath it, far down the empty side street--a vista
without a human figure. Newman stood there a long time; there were
no passers; he was free to gaze his fill. This seemed the goal of his
journey; it was what he had come for. It was a strange satisfaction, and
yet it was a satisfaction; the barren stillness of the place seemed to
be his own release from ineffectual longing. It told him that the woman
within was lost beyond recall, and that the days and years of the future
would pile themselves above her like the huge immovable slab of a tomb.
These days and years, in this place, would always be just so gr