om, the helmet of Navarre.

Being such a cat, it will be perceived that Madame Jolicoeur had
reason in her avowed intention to bestow upon him all of the bestowable
affection remnant in her withered heart's devastated recesses; and,
equally, that she would not be wholly desolate, having such a cat to
comfort her, while standing impartially attendant upon the decrees of
fate.

* * * * *

To assert that any woman not conspicuously old and quite conspicuously
of a fresh plumpness could be left in any city isolate, save for a cat's
company, while the fates were spinning new threads for her, would be to
put a severe strain upon credulity. To make that assertion specifically
of Madame Jolicoeur, and specifically--of all cities in the world!--of
Marseille, would be to strain credulity fairly to the breaking point. On
the other hand, to assert that Madame Jolicoeur, in defence of her
isolation, was disposed to plant machine-guns in the doorway of her
dwelling--a house of modest elegance on the Pave d'Amour, at the
crossing of the Rue Bausset--would be to go too far. Nor indeed--aside
from the fact that the presence of such engines of destruction would
not have been tolerated by the other residents of the quietly
respectable Pave d'Amour--was Madame Jolicoeur herself, as has been
intimated, temperamentally inclined to go to such lengths as
machine-guns in maintenance of her somewhat waveringly desired privacy
in a merely cat-enlivened solitude.

Between these widely separated extremes of conjectural possibility lay
the mediate truth of the matter: which truth--thus resembling precious
gold in its valueless rock matrix--lay embedded in, and was to be
extracted from, the irresponsible utterances of the double row of
loosely hung tongues, always at hot wagging, ranged along the two sides
of the Rue Bausset.

Madame Jouval, a milliner of repute--delivering herself with the
generosity due to a good customer from whom an order for a trousseau was
a not unremote possibility, yet with the acumen perfected by her
professional experiences--summed her views of the situation, in talk
with Madame Vic, proprietor of the Vic bakery, in these words: "It is of
the convenances, and equally is it of her own melancholy necessities,
that this poor Madame retires for a season to sorrow in a suitable
seclusion in the company of her sympathetic cat. Only in such retreat
can she give vent fitly to her desolating grie