eauties of
her eyrie in the Basque mountains which I must one day see. As we chatted
on obliviously an audience of marvelling art students and baigneurs
formed about us quietly. Their serried faces suddenly revealed to me my
ignominious surrender. I started as from a dream and, as she bade me not
forget to call, I kissed her long hand and fled with only a curt farewell
to my hostess.

The channel breeze and the scent of the clover sobered me up. My pity
went out to Anitchkoff and then I remembered that I had seen Fouquart
at the Casino. It seemed too good to be true. Here at Dieppe were both
this enigmatic Marquesa and the prime repository of all authentic
scandal of our times. For the old dandy Fouquart had lived not wisely
but too well through three generations of cosmopolitan gallantry. Had
the censorship and his literary parts permitted, he could have written
a chronicle of famous ladies that would put the Sieur de Brantome's
modest attempt to shame. I found him among the rabble, moodily playing
the little horses for five-franc pieces, but at the mention of the
Marquesa del Puente he kindled.

"A grand woman," he said emphatically, as he dragged me to a safe corner,
"a true model to the anemic and neurotic sex of the day." When asked to
specify he told me how the energy and passion of twenty generations of
robber noblefolk had flowered in her. Scruples or fears she had never
known. From childhood attached to the Carlist cause, she had become the
soul of that movement in the Pyrenees. It was she who haggled with
British armourers, traced routes, planned commissariats, and most of all
drew from far and near soldiers of fortune to captain a hopeless cause.
In such recruiting, Fouquart implied, her loyalty had not flinched at the
most personal tests. What seemed to mystify Fouquart was that none of
these whilom champions ever attained the grace of forgetfulness. Every
year many of these tottering old gentlemen still reported at Castle del
Puente, and there she held court as of old. He himself, although their
relations had been not military but civil, occasionally made so idle a
pilgrimage. "To the shrine of our Lady of the crimson teagown," I
ventured. "You too, _mon vieux_!" he chuckled with ironical
congratulations. Ignoring the impertinence, I interposed the name of
Mantovani. "Our respected colleague," Fouquart exclaimed delightedly.
Before Mantovani fuddled his head about pictures he had been a good
blade, taking