d him with graciousness not
altogether innocent of a certain faded coquetry. Having spoken of
herself as one born too late for her time, she paused and eyed him
keenly, a gleam of light malice in her bright old eyes.

"And you, too, monsieur," she added suddenly. "But you, I think, belong
to an even earlier day..."

"I, madame? And why do you say that?"

"I should have been guillotined under the Terror; but you, monsieur,
you should have been hanged long before that--hanged for a buccaneer on
the Spanish Main."

"Madame may be right," said Duchemin, amused. "And quite possibly I
was, you know."

Then he wondered a little, and began to cultivate some respect for the
shrewdness of her intuitions.

He sat on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to
monsieur le cure of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel
slighted. Was he not on the right of Eve de Montalais?

The girl Louise was placed between the cure and her sister-in-law.
Duchemia could not have been guilty of the offence of ignoring her; but
the truth is that, save when courtesy demanded that he pay her some
attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and
self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager
look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she
might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and
ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow
against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare
exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like
a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration
--which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin
of obviousness. For he was well aware that her response was
impersonal; it was not his but any admiration that she craved as a
parched land wants rain.

Less than three months a wife, more than five years a widow, still
young and ardent, nearing the noontide of her womanhood, and immolated
in this house of perennial mourning, making vain oblation of her youth,
her beauty, the rich wine of life that coursed so lustily through her
being, upon the altar of a memory whose high priestess was only an old,
old woman....

He perceived that it would be quite possible for him, did he yield to
the bent of his sympathies, to dislike Madame de Sevenie most
intensely.

Not that he was apt to have much opportunity to encourage such a
grat