'

'I do.'

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country
into which he travelled. 'Oh!' said he. 'Dear me! But that's a pity,
isn't it?'

'That I am not credulous?' said Miss Wade.

'Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can't believe it easy to
forgive.'

'My experience,' she quietly returned, 'has been correcting my belief
in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have
heard.'

'Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?' said Mr
Meagles, cheerily.

'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always
hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I
know no more.' 'Strong, sir?' said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being
another of his habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic
English, with a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand
it somehow. 'Rather forcible in our fair friend, you'll agree with me, I
think?'

The French gentleman courteously replied, 'Plait-il?' To which Mr
Meagles returned with much satisfaction, 'You are right. My opinion.'

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering
that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect
that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all
preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,
and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what
could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one
another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round
the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly
broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with
the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,
where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the
reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the
lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as
if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been
as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,
or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
forehead, accorded very well with the character