fight a devil! Kiss me,
kiss me again, Paul.'

She thrust him back with rage, tore the ring once more from her finger,
and cast it again upon the floor. Then, with an air of comedy disdain,
'It is really too cheap a thing to fool a fool like you.' And so, with a
shrill peal of stagey laughter, she curtseyed low to him and glided from
the room.

He stood with clenched hands for a single instant, and--how he never
knew--came to a sudden calm. He took up his hat from the desk on which
he had thrown it on entering the room, and sauntered out to the front
of the hotel in a complete vacancy of thought and emotion; and as he
lounged there, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, there was
woven into the woof of life the next thread of his destiny, for who
should drive up to the main door of the Three Friends, with her maid and
her luggage, and all the airs and impertinences of a person of fashion,
but La Femme Incomprise.

CHAPTER XIX

And who should be La Femme Incomprise but Madame la Baronne de Wyeth,
a lady more or less known to fame in two continents, but whom the
unwitting Paul had not yet so much as heard of in the whole course
of his life. He was conscious in the chill and gloom of the November
evening of a lively and slender figure, which danced as if upon springs
for a mere instant as it alighted from the carriage, of an accompanying
rich rustle of silk, the exhalation of a fine perfume, the glance of
a dark eye towards him as he raised his hat and stood aside from the
doorway, and then the first encounter was over and was dismissed from
mind.

There was no Annette at dinner, but he had not expected her, and was
glad to know that she was in hiding. But when, after an hour or two's
aimless ramble under the shadow of the Terre de Falaise, he returned
to the hotel and entered the _salle a manger_, he found there a certain
unwonted sense of warmth and brightness. Not only was the stove
blooming cherry-red at the far end of the apartment, but the little-used
fireplace was aglow with blazing pine-logs, and two extra lamps were
set upon the table. He noted these things with that particularity a man
spends upon detail at those times of subdued and profound emotion when
he seems incapable of noting anything, and took his seat carelessly
at the table in his accustomed place. The juge, and the garde, and the
bachelor chemist, and the chief of the gendarmerie, and all the rest
of the customary convives, dribbled