‘Ah! your wife,’ interrupted Linda Thorne, the mask for a moment dropping, the voice hardening. ‘I was thinking of living, palpitating, flesh-and-blood women--inhabitants of a world where nothing is faultless save over-faultless perfection. I--I mean,’ she went on, rapidly recovering her self-control, ‘that at thirty (and I am past thirty, alas! who looks at me under broad daylight but must see it?)--at thirty a man is scarcely in the noonday sun--a woman already feels the breath of evening. Her one chill hope is--to grow old gracefully. Mrs. Arbuthnot is a girl still.’ ‘And you--were a child when I first knew you in Paris,’ observed Gaston, cleverly quitting the dangerous territory across whose borders he has been betrayed. ‘How natural it seems, Mrs. Thorne, that we should be walking together, you and I, in the old country, with the old language round us again! Do you hear what the children are singing down on the sands yonder?’ Linda set herself to listen, her expressive hands clasped, her face bowed. ‘Nous irons aux bois, Les lauriers sont coupés’-- shouted the shrill young Gallican voices in the distance. Mr. Arbuthnot repeated the nursery rhyme as Murger wove it into his delightful ‘Letter to a Cousin.’ ‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés. Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’ The lady at his side bowed her face lower, and believed, in all integrity, that she was about to be overtaken by tears. Mrs. Linda, to do her justice, was not of a lachrymose temperament. At the zenith of their boy and girl flirtation, years ago, she had never shed a tear for Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot; until he appeared with his beautiful wife, had, indeed, clean forgotten her youthful weakness and his existence. But she possessed considerable imagination, a gloss of surface sentiment. She was also an insatiate novel reader, and had fallen into the habit of perennial strong emotion, leading nowhere. She could realise how a woman who had loved ought to feel, as she recalled past happiness with the lover of the past--both married, and one, alas! fast nearing an age when the most pathetic drama turns, without help from the burlesque writers, into parody. Linda Thorne believed herself to be on the brink of tears. Gaston Arbuthnot believed so, too, and his heart could not but soften over the poor thing’s impressibility. So widely different in effect are tears shed in bitter earnest by one’s wife, and tears shed in pretty make-believe by the wife of another man.