come to pass,--that is, they were about to
snatch from Fate a few days of such free happiness and communion as
during their long years of intimacy they had never enjoyed. In order to
secure these fleeting moments of joy, she, the woman in the case, was
about to run the greatest risk which can in these days be incurred by
civilised woman.

Margaret Pargeter was not free as Vanderlyn was free; she was a
wife,--not a happy wife, but one on whose reputation no shadow had ever
rested,--and further, she was the mother of a child, a son, whom she
loved with an anxious tenderness.... It was these two facts which made
what she was going to do a matter of such moment not only to herself,
but to the man to whom she was now about to commit her honour.

Striding up and down the platform to which he had bought early access by
one of those large fees for which the travelling American of a certain
type is famed, Vanderlyn, with his long lean figure, and stern
pre-occupied face, did not suggest, to the French eyes idly watching
him, a lover,--still less the happy third in one of those conjugal
comedies which play so much greater a part in French literature and in
French drama than they do in French life. He had thrust far back into
his heart the leaping knowledge of what was about to befall him, and he
was bending the whole strength of his mind to avert any possible danger
of ignoble catastrophe to the woman whom he was awaiting, and whose
sudden surrender was becoming more, instead of less, amazing as the long
minutes dragged by.

Vanderlyn's mind went back to the moment, four short days ago, when this
journey had been suddenly arranged. Mrs. Pargeter had just come back
from England, where she had gone to pay some family visits and to see
her little son, who was at a preparatory school; and the American
diplomatist, as was so often his wont, had come to escort her to one of
those picture club shows in which Parisian society delights.

Then, after a quarter of an hour spent by them at the exhibition, the
two friends had slipped away, and had done a thing which was perhaps
imprudent. But each longed, with an unspoken eager craving, to be alone
with the other; the beauty of Paris in springtime tempted them, and it
was the woman who had proposed to the man that they should spend a quiet
hour walking through one of those quarters of old Paris unknown to the
travelling foreigner.

Eagerly Vanderlyn had assented, and so they had driven q