s--!" She paused and drew a deep breath.

"Well?"

"Well--I should show him mercy such as the vaunted law-giver, the
chosen of the Lord, the man of meekness, showed to the conquered
Midianites--no more!" and her laugh had less of music in it than
usual. "I instinctively hate the man, Kenneth McVeigh--Kenneth
McVeigh!--even the name is abhorrent since the day I heard of that
awful barter and sale. It seems strange, Maman, does it not, when I
never saw him in my life--never expected to hear his name again--that
it is to our house he has found his way in Paris; to our house, where
an unknown woman abhors him. Ah!" and she flung the card from her.
"You are right, Maman; I am too often conquered by my own moods and
feelings. The American need be nothing to us."

The dowager was pleased when the subject was dropped. She had seen so
many battles fought, in theory, by humanitarians who are alive to the
injustice of the world. But her day was over for race questions and
creeds. Judithe was inspiring in her sympathies, but the questions
that breathe living flame for us at twenty years, have burned into
dead ashes at eighty.

"Tah! I would rather she would marry and let me see her children," she
grumbled to Madame Blanc; "if she does not, I trust her to your care
when I am gone. She is different since we reached Paris--different,
gayer, and less of the student."

"But no more in touch with society," remarked the attentive companion;
"she accepts no invitations, and goes only to the galleries and
theatres."

"Um!--pictured people, and artificial people! Both have a tendency to
make her an idealist instead of a realist."

To Dumaresque she made the same remark, and suggested he should help
find attractions for her in real life.

"She is too imaginative, and I do not want her to be of the romantic
women; the craze for romance in life is what fills the columns of the
journals with new scandals each month."

"Madame Judithe is safe from that sort of romance," declared her
god-son. "Yet with her face and those glorious eyes one should allow
her some flights in the land of the ideal. She suggests all old Italy
at times, but she has never mentioned her family to me."

"Because it was a topic which both Alain and I forbade her, when she
was younger, to discuss. Naturally, she has not a joyous temperament
and memories of her childhood can only have an unhappy effect, which
accounts for our decision of the matter. Her father die