and stuck on her bosom, which was as flat as the back of your hand, and round her swarthy throat a whole heap of crosses, Blessed Virgins, and Holy Spirits. “You are a free-thinker, you know,” the marquise would say to me, “worse luck; perhaps you have shocked her feelings some time with your talk. Be very careful of anything you say before her; and do not add to my sins in the eyes of my child, towards whom I already feel myself so guilty!” Then, later on, the girl’s behaviour showing no change or improvement whatever: “You will end by hating the child,” the marquise would complain anxiously, “and I cannot blame you”. But she was wrong in this; my feeling towards the sullen child was one of simple indifference, when I took the trouble to think of her at all.

‘I treated her with the ceremonious politeness usual between grown-up people who do not like each other. I addressed her formally as Mademoiselle, and she returned the compliment with a freezing “Monsieur”.…She would do nothing when I was there to attract admiration or even notice.…Her mother could never persuade her to show me one of her drawings or play a piece on the piano in my presence. If ever I came upon her seated at the instrument practising eagerly and industriously, she would stop dead, get up from the music-stool, and refuse utterly to go on.…

‘Once only, when there was company, and her mother desired her to play, she consented to take her place at the open keyboard, with a look of being victimized that was anything but propitiating, I can tell you, and began some drawing-room piece with abominably difficult fingering. I was standing by the fireplace, and enfiladed her with my gaze. Her back was towards me, and there was no mirror in front of her in which she could see I was looking at her.…All of a sudden her back—she always held herself ill, and many a time her mother would tell her: “If you will hold yourself like that, you’ll end by getting consumption”—well, all of a sudden her back straightened as if my look had broken her spine like a bullet; and, slamming down the lid of the piano with a resounding crash, she rushed out of the room.…They went to look for her, but for that evening, at any rate, nothing would induce her to come back.

‘Well, vain as men are, it would seem their vanity is often blind, and, for all her strange behaviour (and indeed I gave it very little attention), I had never a suspicion of the true feeling the mysterious creature entertained for me. Nor yet had her mother; jealous as the latter was of every woman who entered her drawing-room, in this case her jealousy was as fast asleep as my own vanity. The truth was eventually revealed in a sufficiently startling fashion. The marquise, who could keep nothing from her intimates, told me the story, her face still pale with the fright she had had, though bursting with laughter at the notion of having been frightened at all. In doing so she was ill-advised.’

The word ‘ill-advised’ the count had marked with just that touch of emphasis a clever actor knows how to throw into his voice when he has a point to make. This was the thread, he was perfectly aware of the fact, on which the whole interest of his story now hung.

The mere hint was enough apparently, for all twelve faces flushed once more with an intensity of emotion comparable only to the cherubim’s countenances before the throne of the Almighty! Is not curiosity in a woman’s heart as intense an emotion as ever adoration among the angels of God?…For his part, he marked them all, those cherub faces (which were a good deal more than mere head and shoulders, though), and, finding them doubtless primed for what he had to say, quickly resumed and went on without further pause.

‘Yes, she could not help bursting with laughter, merely to think of it!—so the marquise told me a while after, when she came to relate the story; but she had been in no laughing mood at first!—“Only picture the scene,” she began (I will endeavour to recall her exact words); “I was seated just where we are now.”

‘This was one of those small double sofas known as dos-à-dos, of all contrivances in the way of furniture surely the best-designed for a pair of lovers to quarrel and make it up again, without leaving their seats.

“‘But you were not where you are now—thank goodness!—when, who do you think was announced?—you would never guess—who but the respected curé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés? Do you know him?…No, you never go to church, you bad man!…So how should you know the poor old curé, who is a saint, and