jingling bells, who enjoyed the warm milk and the run back of the
fleet hoofs of her saddle-horse.

On this very morning--upon which opens the second act of my drama, I
found her sitting at the next table to mine, chiding one of the jingling
little dogs for his disobedience.

"_Eh ben! tu sais!_" she exclaimed suddenly, with a savage gleam in her
eyes.

I turned and gazed at her in astonishment. It was the first time I had
heard her voice. It was her accent that made me stare.

"_Eh ben! tu sais!_" she repeated, in the patois of the Normand peasant,
lifting her riding crop in warning to the ball of fluff who had refused
to get on his chair and was now wriggling in apology.

"Who is that lady?" I asked the old waiter Emile, who was serving me.

"Madame is an Austrian," he confided to me, bending his fat back as he
poured my coffee.

"Austrian, eh! Are you certain, Emile?"

"_Parbleu_, monsieur" replied Emile, "one is never certain of any one in
Paris. I only tell monsieur what I have heard. Ah! it is very easy to be
mistaken in Paris, monsieur. Take, for instance, the lady in deep
mourning, with the two little girls, over there at the table under the
lilac bush."

"She is young to be a widow," I interposed, glancing discreetly in the
direction he nodded.

Emile smiled faintly. "She is not a widow, monsieur," he returned,
"neither is she as Spanish as she looks; she is Polish and dances at the
Folies Parisiennes under the name of _La Belle Gueritta_ from Seville."

"But her children look French," I ventured.

"They are the two little girls of her concierge, monsieur." Emile's
smile widened until it spread in merry wrinkles to the corners of his
twinkling eyes.

"In all that lace and velvet?" I exclaimed.

"Precisely, monsieur."

"And why the deep mourning, Emile?"

"It is a pose, monsieur. One must invent novelties, eh? when one is as
good-looking as that. Besides, madame's reputation has not been of the
best for some time. Monsieur possibly remembers the little affair last
year in the Rue des Mathurins? Very well, it was she who extracted the
hundred thousand francs from the Marquis de Villiers. Madame now gives
largely to charity and goes to mass."

"Blackmail, Emile?"

"Of the worst kind, and so monsieur sees how easily one can be mistaken,
is it not so? _Sacristi!_ one never knows."

"But are you certain you are not mistaken about your Austrian, Emile?" I
ventured.

He shrugged his shoulders