serable trails and patches of snow. All the glory
of the season must have been within herself--and I was glad this feeling
had come into her life, if only for a little time.

"I am pleased to hear you say these words." She gave me a quick look.
Quick, not stealthy. If there was one thing of which she was absolutely
incapable, it was stealthiness, Her sincerity was expressed in the very
rhythm of her walk. It was I who was looking at her covertly--if I may
say so. I knew where she had been, but I did not know what she had seen
and heard in that nest of aristocratic conspiracies. I use the word
aristocratic, for want of a better term. The Chateau Borel, embowered
in the trees and thickets of its neglected grounds, had its fame in our
day, like the residence of that other dangerous and exiled woman, Madame
de Stael, in the Napoleonic era. Only the Napoleonic despotism, the
booted heir of the Revolution, which counted that intellectual woman for
an enemy worthy to be watched, was something quite unlike the autocracy
in mystic vestments, engendered by the slavery of a Tartar conquest.
And Madame de S-- was very far from resembling the gifted author of
_Corinne_. She made a great noise about being persecuted. I don't
know if she were regarded in certain circles as dangerous. As to being
watched, I imagine that the Chateau Borel could be subjected only to a
most distant observation. It was in its exclusiveness an ideal abode for
hatching superior plots--whether serious or futile. But all this did not
interest me. I wanted to know the effect its extraordinary inhabitants
and its special atmosphere had produced on a girl like Miss Haldin, so
true, so honest, but so dangerously inexperienced! Her unconsciously
lofty ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind left her disarmed
before her own impulses. And there was also that friend of her brother,
the significant new arrival from Russia.... I wondered whether she
had managed to meet him.

We walked for some time, slowly and in silence.

"You know," I attacked her suddenly, "if you don't intend telling me
anything, you must say so distinctly, and then, of course, it shall be
final. But I won't play at delicacy. I ask you point-blank for all the
details."

She smiled faintly at my threatening tone.

"You are as curious as a child."

"No. I am only an anxious old man," I replied earnestly.

She rested her glance on me as if to ascertain the degree of my anxiety
or the number