“You may go home. I shall not need you again to-day,” she directed, and, turning to the avenue, she began to walk down the Champs Elysées. She might at least be mistress of her own gait; walk with short, feverish little steps or retard her pace to keep harmony with her alternate rapid or halting reflections, for her mind, as she walked, went back over the past six months of her married life with a persistence, a clearness, that denoted how important were the details, how ineffaceable were the marks her experiences had made upon her, how intensely she felt what she had lived, how seriously she had taken life, how absorbed she was in the man to whom she had attached herself--how desperately she loved her husband. The vividness with which she thought of him had the precision of a fresh image. The impulsive rush of herself toward the harbor her conception of him made proved, by its very force and freshness, that thinking of him like this was a new thing. She had lived with him, existed by his side, for six years, and had never thought about him, around him, as she did to-day. She gasped. “Perhaps if I had thought about him a little more and loved him a little less, _this_ might not have happened!” The happening, so distressing to her, which had caused her, at an unusual hour, to ring for her carriage, dress and fly from the house on an expedition she knew to be close to ill-breeding in its likeness to melodrama and its distinct opposition to codes of expedient, had been finding a letter--the world-worn story that comes to each woman with a new pang. As Mrs. Evremond reached the Rond Point, she asked herself: “What am I really going to do? What do I expect to see and find, and how shall I act when I find it?” Women constantly commit the platitude--if such an expression can be used--of thinking they are acting on certain occasions contrary to their characters, out of gear with their codes. Mrs. Evremond was not an impulsive temperament. Unaccustomed to crises or events that called for the quick decision of more brilliant and self-sufficient minds, she had found herself face to face with a problem, and was acting with a precipitation that made her dizzy, and a promptitude that suggested she had been brought into contact with just such difficulties many times before.