udying in Paris? Oh, Laurence, I'd no idea that you
really meant to buy it!"

A little surprised at the keenness of her interest, he had answered
quietly, "Yes, when the owner was going through Paris last week, I found
he wanted the money, so--so the house is mine, though none of the legal
formalities have yet been complied with. I'm told that the old woman who
was caretaker there can make me comfortable enough for the few days I
can be away." He added in a different, a lower tone, "Ah! Peggy, if only
it were possible for us to go there together--how you would delight in
the place!"

"Would you like me to come with you? I will if you like, Laurence." She
had asked the question very simply--but Vanderlyn, looking at her
quickly, had seen that her hand was trembling, her eyes brimming with
tears. Then she had spoken gently, deliberately--seeming to plead with
herself, rather than with him, for a few days of such dual loneliness
for which all lovers long and which during their long years of intimacy
they had never once, even innocently, enjoyed. And he had grasped with
exultant gratitude--what man would have done otherwise?--at what she
herself came and offered him.

Walking up and down the solitary platform, Vanderlyn lived over again
each instant of that strange momentous conversation uttered four days
ago in the stately sunlit square which forms the heart of old Paris. How
the merry ghost of Marion Delorme, peeping out of one of the long narrow
casements of the corner house which was once hers, must have smiled to
hear this virtuous Englishwoman cast virtue to the light Parisian winds!

Vanderlyn also recalled, with almost the same surprise and discomfort as
he had experienced at the time itself, the way in which Margaret
Pargeter, so refined and so delicately bred, had discussed all the
material details connected with their coming adventure--details from
which the American diplomatist himself had shrunk, and which he would
have done almost anything to spare her.

"There is one person, and one alone," she had said with some decision,
"who must know. I must tell Adele de Lera--she must have my address, for
I cannot remain without news of my boy a whole week. As for Tom"--she
had flushed, and then gone on steadily--"Tom will believe that I am
going to stay with Adele at Marly-le-Roi, and my letters will be sent to
her house. Besides," she had added, "Tom himself is going away, to
England, for a fortnight."

To the