only excite derision if it were
openly brought against me."

"You came here with a purpose," she said, coldly. "I shall be obliged if
you will fulfil your purpose, and--"

"When I have fulfilled my purpose I will go. I will be as brief as I
can. When I was a lad of twenty I was desperately in love with Miss
Constance Pleyel, or thought I was, which at that time of life is pretty
much the same thing."

"It will serve at any time of life," said the baroness. She listened
with an air of aversion and impatience, which made a painful task more
painful to perform.

"My father was a half-pay officer," I went on, "very poor and very
proud. Miss Pleyel's father was a tradesman, an Austrian Jew, rich,
vulgar, and ostentatious."

"Rich, certainly," the baroness responded. "I can congratulate you
on one point, Captain Fyffe; you have not yet, so far as I can learn,
suffered sentiment to blind you to the charms of wealth."

I passed the sneer. When a man is resolutely bent upon a journey he does
not stop to fight the flies that tease him.

"We moved in different circles. I spoke to Miss Pleyel perhaps a dozen
times, but in the hot enthusiasm of youthful love I wrote to her often."

"I have seen your letters," said the baroness, with a short,
contemptuous laugh. "They might have deceived any woman."

I allowed myself to be diverted for a moment.

"She keeps them? It is a sign of grace in her that she cares, after so
many years, to remember an honest, boyish passion."

"A sign of grace?" cried the baroness, passionately. "Oh, I lose
patience with this cool infamy!"

Now all this time has gone by I can recall this scene as if it were a
bit of stage play; and now that I can read every motive and understand
every movement, I am inclined to think the baroness's part in it the
finest piece of stage work I have ever seen.

"If you will permit me, madame, I will try to put the case in such a
way that there shall be no mistake as to what I mean to say. I saw Miss
Pleyel rarely, and never once in private. I wrote to her often; I wrote
reams of boyish nonsense, which was all meant in fiery earnest then.
Then news came. Miss Pleyel ran away from her father's house with
Colonel Hill-yard, a man of wealth, a married man with a large family,
and, in spite of that fact, a notorious _roue_. They lived abroad
for six months, and Miss Pleyel ran away from Colonel Hillyard with a
Russian officer, with whom she went to St. Petersburg, whe