“I decline to credit such a monstrous statement,” said the little lady, holding her head very high. “Nothing shall convince me that that dear, sweet, placid old man—who is certainly not to blame for the accident of his birth—could ever have been guilty of a dishonorable action, much less a wicked murderous deed, such as you describe! Do you know him? I mean in the sense of having spoken to him, because everybody bows to M. Dunoisse on the Promenade. You have!.... Next time you happen to meet, you might say that if he would allow you to introduce him to your wife, I should be pleased—so very pleased to make his acquaintance——”

“Ah, yes! Quite so! We have had a little chat or two, certainly,” the dyspeptic gentleman of affairs admitted. “And I don’t doubt he would be highly gratified.” The speaker finished his lozenge, and added, with mild malignity: “That you would find him interesting I feel perfectly sure. For he certainly has seen a good deal of life, according to Pédelaborde.... He held a commission in a crack regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, and ran through a great fortune, I am told, with the assistance of his commanding officer’s wife—uncommonly attractive woman, too, Pédelaborde tells me. And he was on the Prince-President’s Staff at the time of the coup d’État, and after the Restoration—Pédelaborde positively takes his oath that this is true!—was shut up in a French frontier fortress for an attempt on the life of the Emperor. But he escaped or was released, when the Allies were pounding away at Sevastopol, in 1854, and Ada Merling—dead now, I believe, like nearly everybody else one has ever heard named in connection with the War in the Crimea—was nursing the wounded English soldiers at Scutari.” The dyspeptic politician added acidly:

“Here comes M. Dunoisse trundling down the Promenade, saintly smile and all the rest of it.... Shall I give him your message now?”

But the speaker’s better-half, at last convinced, indignantly withdrew her previous tender of cordiality, and as the invalid chair, impelled by the white-capped, blue-cloaked[Pg 7] nurse, who had now replaced the nun, rolled slowly down the wide garden-bordered, orchard-backed Place of ancient timber houses that is Zeiden, the white-haired wearer of the black velvet cap, nodding and beaming in acknowledgment of the elaborately respectful salutations of the male visitors and the smiling bows of the ladies, received from one little British matron a stare so freezing in its quality that his jaw dropped, and his bright black eyes became circular with astonishment and dismay.

[Pg 7]

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