year in Germany was up two months ago. I went home for a
fortnight, and here I am as a matter of course."

"I might have known you would carry out your programme exactly as you
had sketched it, but I thought that the disturbed state of things over
here might have induced you to defer that part of the plan until a more
appropriate season. Surely Paris is not just at present a pleasant abode
for a young lady, and is likely to be a much more unpleasant one later
on."

"I think there could hardly be a more appropriate time for being here,
Mr. Hartington; one could have no better time for studying social
problems than the present when conventionalities have gone to the winds
and one sees people as they are; but this is hardly the place to talk. I
am boarding with a family at No. 15 Avenue de Passy. Will you come and
see me there?"

"Certainly I will, if you will allow me. What will be a convenient
time?"

"I should say three o'clock in the afternoon. They are all out then,
except Madame Michaud and her little daughter, and we shall be able to
chat comfortably, which we could not do if you came in the evening, when
the father is at home and two boys who are away at school during the
day. Will you come to-morrow?"

"Yes, my afternoons are free at present."

She held out her hand and then walked away with a steady business-like
step. Cuthbert stood watching her till she had disappeared in the crowd.

"She has no more sentiment in her composition at present," he said to
himself with a laugh that had some bitterness in it, "than a nether
millstone. Her mind is so wrapped up in this confounded fad of hers that
there is no room in it for anything else. I might have been a cousin,
instead of a man she had refused, for any embarrassment or awkwardness
she felt at our sudden meeting. It clearly made no impression at all
upon her. She remembers, of course, that she met me at Newquay. I don't
suppose she has really forgotten that I asked her to be my wife, but it
was a mere incident, and affected her no more than if I had asked her to
buy a picture and she had refused. I wish to goodness I had not met her
again. I had got fairly over it, and was even beginning to wonder how I
ever could have wanted to marry anyone so different in every way from
the sort of woman I fancied I should have fallen in love with. How
foolish of her coming over to Paris at this time. Well, I daresay it has
all saved a lot of trouble. I suppose at that