he
afternoon on clear days, caught these two creatures in the same beam. They
made a delicious sight--Audrey dark, with her large forehead and negligible
nose, and the concierge's wife rather doll-like in the regularity of her
features. They were delicious not only because of their varied charm, but
because they were so absurdly wise and omniscient, and because they had
come to settled conclusions about every kind of worldly problem. Youth and
vitality equalised their ranks, and the fact that Audrey possessed many
ascertained ancestors, and a part of the earth's surface, and much money,
and that the concierge's wife possessed nothing but herself and a few bits
of furniture, was not of the slightest importance.

The concierge's wife, after curiosity concerning tennis, grew confidential
about herself, and more confidential. And at last she lowered her tones,
and with sparkling eyes communicated information to Audrey in a voice that
was little more than a whisper.

"Oh! truly? I must go," hastily said Audrey, blushing, and off she ran,
reduced in an instant to the schoolgirl. Her departure was a retreat.
These occasional discomfitures made a faint blot on the excellence of being
a widow.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SWOON

In the north-east corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, where the lawn-tennis
courts were permitted by a public authority which was strangely impartial
and cosmopolitan in the matter of games, Miss Ingate sat sketching a group
of statuary with the Rue de Vaugirard behind it. She was sketching in the
orthodox way, on the orthodox stool, with the orthodox combined paint-box
and easel, and the orthodox police permit in the cover of the box.

The bright and warm weather was tonic; it accounted for the whole
temperament of Parisians. Under such a sky, with such a delicate pricking
vitalisation in the air, it was impossible not to be Parisian. The trees,
all arranged in beautiful perspectives, were coming into leaf, and through
their screens could be seen everywhere children shouting as they played at
ball and top, and both kinds of nurses, and scores of perambulators and
mothers, and a few couples dallying with their sensations, and old men
reading papers, and old women knitting and relating anecdotes or entire
histories. And nobody was curious beyond his own group. The people were
perfectly at home in this grandiose setting of gardens and fountains and
grey palaces, with theatres, boulevards and the odour and