he had unpacked the evening before. His
gentle stewardess looked at him through eyes a trifle bedimmed. "Dear
me, sir," she exclaimed, "I thought you said that you were going to stay
forever."

"I meant that I was going to stay away forever," said Newman kindly. And
since his departure from Paris on the following day he has certainly not
returned. The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of stand ready to
receive him; but they serve only as a spacious residence for Mrs. Bread,
who wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the tassels of the
curtains, and keeps her wages, which are regularly brought her by
a banker's clerk, in a great pink Sevres vase on the drawing-room
mantel-shelf.

Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram's and found Tom
Tristram by the domestic fireside. "I'm glad to see you back in Paris,"
this gentleman declared. "You know it's really the only place for a
white man to live." Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome, according
to his own rosy light, and offered him a convenient resume of the
Franco-American gossip of the last six months. Then at last he got up
and said he would go for half an hour to the club. "I suppose a man
who has been for six months in California wants a little intellectual
conversation. I'll let my wife have a go at you."

Newman shook hands heartily with his host, but did not ask him to
remain; and then he relapsed into his place on the sofa, opposite to
Mrs. Tristram. She presently asked him what he had done after leaving
her. "Nothing particular," said Newman.

"You struck me," she rejoined, "as a man with a plot in his head. You
looked as if you were bent on some sinister errand, and after you had
left me I wondered whether I ought to have let you go."

"I only went over to the other side of the river--to the Carmelites,"
said Newman.

Mrs. Tristram looked at him a moment and smiled. "What did you do there?
Try to scale the wall?"

"I did nothing. I looked at the place for a few minutes and then came
away."

Mrs. Tristram gave him a sympathetic glance. "You didn't happen to meet
M. de Bellegarde," she asked, "staring hopelessly at the convent wall as
well? I am told he takes his sister's conduct very hard."

"No, I didn't meet him, I am happy to say," Newman answered, after a
pause.

"They are in the country," Mrs. Tristram went on; "at--what is the name
of the place?--Fleurieres. They returned there at the time you left
Paris and have been spen