Paris without her knowledge and have followed
her to London?

She began to feel really excited, and there was something almost
youthful in her excitement. Yet she was on the eve of a horrible
passing. For that day was her last day in the forties. On the following
morning she would wake up a woman of fifty.

While the two men were still having their coffee Lady Sellingworth and
her friend got up to go away. As her tall figure disappeared the brown
man whispered something to his companion and they both smiled. Then they
continued talking in very low voices, and not in French.

Paris! All the rest of that day Lady Sellingworth thought about Paris!
Already it stood for a great deal in her life. Was it perhaps going to
stand for much more? In Paris long ago--she wished it were not so
long ago--she had tasted a curious freedom, had given herself to her
wildness, had enlarged her boundaries. And now Paris called her again,
called her through the voice of this man whom she did not yet know.

Deliberately that day he had summoned her to Paris. She had no doubt
about that. And if she went? He must have some quite definite intention
connected with his wish for her to go. It could only be a romantic
intention.

And yet to-morrow she would be fifty!

He was quite young. He could not be more than five-and-twenty.

For a moment her imp spoke loudly in her ear. He told her that by this
time she must have learnt her lesson, that it was useless to pretend
that she had not, that Rupert Louth's marriage had taught her all that
she needed to know, and that now she must realize that the time for
adventures, for romance, for the secret indulgence of the passions, was
in her case irrevocably over. "Fifty! Fifty! Fifty!" he knelled in her
ears. And there were obscure voices within her which backed him up,
faintly, as if half afraid, agreeing with him.

She listened. She could not help listening, though she hated it. And for
a moment she was almost inclined to submit to the irony of the imp, to
trample upon her desire, and to grasp hands once and for all with her
self-respect.

The imp said to her: "If you go to Paris you will be making a fool
of yourself. That man doesn't really want you to go. He is only a
mischievous boy amusing himself at your expense. Perhaps he has made a
bet with that friend of his that you will cross on the same day that
he does. You are far too old for adventures. Look in the glass and see
yourself as you re