white explosion of powder, was
visible, and La Clavel proceeded to the font of holy water. As he
joined her she complained:

"You should have held it for me in your palm; what barbarians the
Americans and English are." She was, characteristically, dressed as
brightly as possible, in a mauve skirt with an elaborately cut flounce
swaying about yellow silk stockings, a manton of white crepe de Chine
embroidered with immense emerald green blossoms; her hair piled about
its tall comb was covered with a mantilla falling in scallops across
her brilliant cheeks. In the church, that reduced so much, she was
startling in her bold color and presence.

A negro, whom Charles recognized as a servant at the St. Louis,
followed her with a heavy roll and a small unpainted chair with a
caned seat. Before the altar, under the low pointed arches of the
transept, he spread out a deep-piled Persian rug--where La Clavel
promptly kneeled--and set the chair conveniently for her. Her devotion
at an end, the dancer rose and disposed herself comfortably. The
constant flutter of a fan with sandal wood sticks stirred the edge of
her mantilla. After she had scrutinized the worshippers about them,
she turned to Charles, speaking in a guarded voice.

He listened with an intense concentration, in the careful preliminaries
of a difficult act of memory, asking her, when it could not be
avoided, to repeat facts or names. They were, now, concerned with the
New York Junta, involved tables of costs, and La Clavel was palpably
annoyed by the unaccustomed necessity of a strict mental effort. She
raised her eyebrows, shot an inviting glance at an interested man of
middle age, and shut and opened her fan by an irritable twist of the
wrist. Watching, weighing, her mood, Charles abruptly brought her
recital to an end.

"That is enough for the present," he decided.

"My choice infant," she retorted, "your air of being my director is
comic. And I could wish you were not so immaculate, so unworldly--you
are tiresome more often than not. I could scream with laughing
when I think you are supposed to be my servant of love." The
striking of a silvery bell interrupted her with the necessity for a
reverence. The mutter of prayer was instantly lost in echoless
space. The genuflexions of the priests and acolytes were rapid.
"This secrecy," she went on, "is against my disposition, unnatural.
I am a woman in whom the complete expression of every feeling is
not only a goo