"Do _you_ disapprove of me?" says he.

I smiled, I suppose, but my lips only moved. And a look of pain came
into his face.

"Somewhere else--some other time," he rather whispered. "God knows how.
But you will remember Monty Cranch. It's not soon you'll be forgetting
him, girl."

With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow,
and his words were true--as true as death. And though it was all many
years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water
lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the
flowers on the table that were mocking me--a nosegay one minute, and the
next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to
now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.

Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out,
but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke
and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn.
There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of
us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or
swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months' time
was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals
and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil
curses for pain and her losses on 'Change, and slow horses, and she who
had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who
called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in
a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the "Word of
Harmonious Equilibrium."

"You are all I have now," she would say to me after the cupboard was
bare. "Whatever you do, don't get married, my child. These men are all
alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them,
and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these
offenses to good taste."

The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men
than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time
had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half
frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I
thought he'd always be the same.

Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at
first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame
herself was out of the business. I nev