"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me
(as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my
observation.

"No," said I.

"Shoot?"

"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard
Saint-Michel."

"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"

"Paris," said I.

"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of
bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure
at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic
horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended
it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her
annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired
whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient
hosts--pale shades of Acheron--who have angled off the quays of the
Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook
my head.

"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One
taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."

"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."

"At Christmas."

"What is he like?"

The hitherto unspeculative eyes of the young woman lit up; an answering
gleam awoke in the other's. Myra Brown and her engagement absorbed their
attention, and I slunk back in my chair, forgotten. I suffered agonies
of shyness. I disliked these foolish virgins and longed to flee from
them; but how to rise and make my escape, without rudeness, passed my
powers of invention. I looked around me. At the tea-table on the farther
side of the room stood Joanna and Major Walters. He was a tall soldierly
man with a blond moustache and fair hair thinning on the crown. There
are about two thousand like him at the present moment on the active and
retired list of the British Army. He seemed to be talking earnestly to
her, for her eyes were fixed on the point of her shoe, which she moved
slightly, from side to side. Presently she flashed a glance at him
somewhat angrily and her lips moved as though she said:--

"What right have you to speak like that?"

He made the Englishman's awkward paraphrase of the shrug, looked swiftly
over at Paragot, and turned to her with a remark. Then for the first
time since the Comte de Verneuil's death, the glacier blue came into her
eyes. She said something. He executed a little stiff bow and walked
away. Joanna, bearing herself very