n he was very young--and I was younger. I should have liked to have
seen him--once more."

"Did you not see him?" I asked, abruptly.

Her back was toward me; very deliberately she turned her pretty head
and looked at me over her shoulder, studying my face a moment.

"Yes, I saw him. I should have liked to have seen him--once more,"
she said, as though she had first calculated the effect on me of a
different reply.

She led the way into that small room overlooking the garden where I
had been twice received by Madame de Vassart. Here she took leave of
us, abandoning us to our own designs. Mine was to find a large
arm-chair and sit down in it, and give Speed a few instructions.
Speed's was to prowl around Paradise for information, and, if
possible, telegraph to Lorient for troops to catch Buckhurst
red-handed.

He left me turning over the leaves of the "Chanson de Roland," saying
that he would return in a little while with any news he might pick up,
and that he would do his best to catch Buckhurst in the foolish trap
which that gentleman had set for others.

Tiring of the poem, I turned my eyes toward the garden, where, in the
sunshine, heaps of crisped leaves lay drifted along the base of the
wall or scattered between the rows of herbs which were still ripely
green. The apricots had lost their leaves, so had the grapevines and
the fig-trees; but the peach-trees were in foliage; pansies and
perpetual roses bloomed amid sere and seedy thickets of larkspurs,
phlox, and dead delphinium.

On the wall a cat sat, sunning her sleek flanks. Something about the
animal seemed familiar to me, and after a while I made up my mind that
this was Ange Pitou, Jacqueline's pet, abandoned by her mistress and
now a feline derelict. Speed must have been mistaken when he told me
that Jacqueline had taken her cat; or possibly the home-haunting
instinct had brought the creature back, abandoning her mistress to her
fortunes.

If I had been in my own house I should have offered Ange Pitou
hospitality; as it was, I walked out into the sunny garden and made
courteous advances which were ignored. I watched the cat for a few
moments, then sat down on the bench. The inertia which follows
recovery from a shock, however light, left me with the lazy
acquiescence of a convalescent, willing to let the world drift for an
hour or two, contented to relax, apathetic, comfortable.

Seaward the gulls sailed like white feathers floating; the rocky
ramp