the femme de chambre, who seemed a very intelligent person, begged to remind him that the season was drawing to a close, that Madame had taken the chalet but for five weeks, only ten days of which period were yet to expire, that ces dames, as Monsieur perhaps knew, were great travellers, who had been half over the world and thought nothing of breaking camp at an hour’s notice, and that, in fine, Madame might very well have received a telegram summoning her to another part of the country. “And where have the ladies gone?” asked Bernard. “For the moment, to Paris.” “And in Paris where have they gone?” “Dame, chez elles--to their house,” said the femme de chambre, who appeared to think that Bernard asked too many questions. But Bernard persisted. “Where is their house?” The waiting-maid looked at him from head to foot. “If Monsieur wishes to write, many of Madame’s letters come to her banker,” she said, inscrutably. “And who is her banker?” “He lives in the Rue de Provence.” “Very good--I will find him out,” said our hero, turning away. The discriminating reader who has been so good as to interest himself in this little narrative will perhaps at this point exclaim with a pardonable consciousness of shrewdness: “Of course he went the next day to the Rue de Provence!” Of course, yes; only as it happens Bernard did nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he ever did in his life--a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with regard to which he often afterward wondered whence he had drawn the ability for so remarkable a feat--he simply spent a fortnight at Blanquais-les-Galets. It was a very quiet fortnight; he spoke to no one, he formed no relations, he was company to himself. It may be added that he had never found his own company half so good. He struck himself as a reasonable, delicate fellow, who looked at things in such a way as to make him refrain--refrain successfully, that was the point--from concerning himself practically about Angela Vivian. His saying that he would find out the banker in the Rue de Provence had been for the benefit of the femme de chambre, whom he thought rather impertinent; he had really no intention whatever of entering that classic thoroughfare. He took long walks, rambled on the beach, along the base of the cliffs and among the brown sea-caves, and he thought a good deal of certain incidents which have figured at an earlier stage of this narrative. He had forbidden himself the future, as an object of contemplation, and it was therefore a matter of necessity that his imagination should take refuge among the warm and familiar episodes of the past. He wondered why Mrs. Vivian should have left the place so suddenly, and was of course struck with the analogy between this incident and her abrupt departure from Baden. It annoyed him, it troubled him, but it by no means rekindled the alarm he had felt on first perceiving the injured Angela on the beach.