And the bewitching mystery floated away from me and through the open window of her room. You will imagine that my "intuition" did not lead me to the conclusion to which Lady Maréchale's led her, or assuredly should I have followed the donor of the clematis, despite her prohibition. Even with my "intuition" pointing where it did, I am not sure what I might have done if, in her salon, I had not caught sight of a valet and a lady's maid in waiting with her coffee, and they are not such spectators as one generally selects. The servants closed her windows and drew down their Venetian blinds, and I returned to my coffee. Whether the two ladies within had overheard her conversation as she had heard theirs, I cannot say, but they looked trebly refrigerated, had congealed themselves into the chilliest human ice that is imaginable, and comported themselves towards me fully as distantly as though I had brought a dozen ballet-girls in to dinner with them, or introduced them to my choicest acquaintance from the Château des Fleurs. "A man's taste is so pitiably low!" remarked Lady Maréchale, in her favorite stage aside to Mrs. Protocol; to which that other lady responded, "Disgracefully so!" Who _was_ my lovely unknown with the bright falcon eyes and the charming laugh, with her strange freedom that yet was _not_, somehow, free, and her strange fascination? I bade my man ask Chanderlos her name--couriers know everything generally--but neither Mills nor Chanderlos gave me any information. The people of the house did not know, or said they did not; they only knew she had servants in attendance who came with her, who revealed nothing, and paid any price for the best of everything. Are impertinent questions ever asked where money is plentiful? I was dressing the next morning something later than usual, when I heard the roll of a carriage in the courtyard below. I looked through the half-open persiennes with a semi-presentiment that it was my sweet foreigner who was leaving ere I could presume on my clematis or improve our acquaintance. True enough, she it was, leaving Vicq d'Azyr in a travelling-carriage, with handsome roans and servants in imperial-blue liveries. Who the deuce could she be? "Well, Constance," said I, as I bade Lady Maréchale good morning, "your _bête noire_ won't 'press herself into your acquaintance,' as you were dreading last night, and won't excite Maréchale and me to any more high treason. Won't you chant a Te Deum? She left this morning." "So I perceived," answered Lady Maréchale, frigidly; by which I suppose _she_ had not been above the weakness of looking through _her_ persiennes. "What a pity you and Agneta agitated yourselves with such unnecessary alarm! It must have cost you a great deal of eau-de-Cologne and sal-volatile, I am afraid, last night. Do you think she contaminated the air of the salle-à-manger, because I will order Mills to throw some disinfectant about before you go down?"