e bird set free.

"Wait," he called; "Nora Scarlet, I promise." He hurried to her. "You
forget I am a lame jackdaw."

Then she stood still. They were walking together, his arm around her
waist, when they came out at the alley's end. Standing by a marble bust
on its pedestal, quite alone and meditative, as if she had just looked
up, seen something and nevertheless decided to wait, Fairfax saw Mrs.
Faversham.

CHAPTER XIII

His first sensation, as he saw her, was as if a sudden light had broken
upon a soul's darkness which until this moment had blinded him,
oppressed him, condemned him; then there came a great revulsion against
himself. Mrs. Faversham was very pale, as white as the bust by whose
side she stood. She held out her hand, in its delicate glove, and tried
to greet him naturally.

"How do you do, Mr. Rainsford?"

He was conscious of how kind she was, how womanly. He had refused her
invitation and flaunted in her sight a vulgar pastoral. His cheeks were
hot, his lips hardly formed a greeting. This was the work he had offered
as an excuse to her when he had said that he could not go to Versailles.
"Then what is it to her?" he thought; "she is engaged to be married to
Cedersholm. What am I or my vulgarities to her?" There was a fresh
revulsion.

"Will you let me present Miss Scarlet," he said quietly, "Mrs.
Faversham?"

Mrs. Faversham, who had recovered herself, gave her hand into the
woollen glove of Nora Scarlet, and, looking at the young girl, said that
perhaps they had been sketching.

"Not in January," replied Nora with perfect self-possession. From the
crown of Mrs. Faversham's fur hat to the lady's shoes, the girl's honest
eyes had taken in her elegance and her grace. "We have been walking a
bit after Paris."

Fairfax felt as though he had been separated from this lady for a long
time, as though he had just come back, after a voyage whose details were
tiresome. She seemed too divine to him and at once cruelly near and
cruelly removed, in her dark dress, her small walking hat with a spray
of mistletoe shining against the fur, her faultless shoes, her face so
sweet and high-bred under her veil, her aloofness from everything with
which he came in contact, her freedom from care and struggle, from
temptation, from the sordidness of which he had long been a part. He
suffered horribly; short as the moment was, the acuteness of its
sensations comprised for him a miserable eternity.

"I have m