hether--model of discretion as you are--I hadn't
cut you out work for which you wouldn't thank me."

"She has her consolation in herself," the young man said; "she needs
none that any one else can offer her. That's for troubles for which--be
it more, be it less--our own folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves
hasn't a grain of folly left."

"Ah don't say that!"--Mrs. Draper knowingly protested. "Just a little
folly's often very graceful."

Longmore rose to go--she somehow annoyed him. "Don't talk of grace," he
said, "till you've measured her reason!"

For two years after his return to America he heard nothing of Madame de
Mauves. That he thought of her intently, constantly, I need hardly say;
most people wondered why such a clever young man shouldn't "devote"
himself to something; but to himself he seemed absorbingly occupied. He
never wrote to her; he believed she wouldn't have "liked" it. At last he
heard that Mrs. Draper had come home and he immediately called on her.
"Of course," she said after the first greetings, "you're dying for news
of Madame de Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I heard
from her two or three times during the year after your seeing her. She
left Saint-Germain and went to live in the country on some old property
of her husband's. She wrote me very kind little notes, but I felt
somehow that--in spite of what you said about 'consolation'--they were
the notes of a wretched woman. The only advice I could have given her
was to leave her scamp of a husband and come back to her own land and
her own people. But this I didn't feel free to do, and yet it made me
so miserable not to be able to help her that I preferred to let our
correspondence die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year.
Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young Frenchman whom
I accidentally learned to be a friend of that charming sister of the
Count's, Madame Clairin. I lost no time in asking him what he knew
about Madame de Mauves--a countrywoman of mine and an old friend. 'I
congratulate you on the friendship of such a person,' he answered.
'That's the terrible little woman who killed her husband.' You may
imagine I promptly asked for an explanation, and he told me--from his
point of view--what he called the whole story. M. de Mauves had fait
quelques folies which his wife had taken absurdly to heart. He had
repented and asked her forgiveness, which she had inexorably refused.
She was very pretty, and