"Oh la la! il a du
panache!"

But Charley now disclosed himself to be a true man of the world--the
financial world--by picking the pieces out of the mud; and, while
he wiped them and enclosed them in his handkerchief and with perfect
dignity returned them to his pocket, he remarked simply, with a shrug:
"As you please." His accent also was ever so little foreign--that New
York downtown foreign, of the second generation, which stamps so, many
of our bankers.

The female now leaned from her seat, and with the tone of setting the
whole thing right, explained: "We had no idea it was a lady."

"Doubtless you're not accustomed to their appearance," said John to
Charley.

I don't know what Charley would have done about this; for while the
completely foreign voice was delightedly whispering, "Toujours
le panache!" a new, deep, and altogether different female voice
exclaimed:--

"Why, John, it's you!"

So that was Hortense, then! That rich and quiet utterance was hers, a
schooled and studied management of speech. I found myself surprised,
and I knew directly why; that word of one of the old ladles, "I consider
that she looks like a steel wasp," had implanted in me some definite
anticipations to which the voice certainly did not correspond. How
fervently I desired that she would lift her thick veil, while John, with
hat in hand, was greeting her, and being presented to her companions!
Why she had not spoken to John sooner was of course a recondite
question, and beyond my power to determine with merely the given
situation to guide me. Hadn't she recognized him before? Had her
thick veil, and his position, and the general slight flurry of the
misadventure, intercepted recognition until she heard his voice when
he addressed Charley. Or had she known her lover at once, and rapidly
decided that the moment was an unpropitious one for a first meeting
after absence, and that she would pass on to Kings Port unrevealed, but
then had found this plan become impossible through the collision
between Charley and John? It was not until certain incidents of the days
following brought Miss Rieppe's nature a good deal further home to me,
that a third interpretation of her delay in speaking to John dawned upon
my mind; that I was also made aware how a woman's understanding of
the words "Steel wasp," when applied by her to one of her own sex, may
differ widely from a man's understanding of them; and that Miss Rieppe,
through her thick veil,