“I was back here just thirty days after I had gone away.” “And here you have remained ever since?” “Oh, yes!” she said gently. “When are you going to Europe again?” This question seemed brutal; but there was something that irritated me in the softness of her resignation, and I wished to extort from her some expression of impatience. She fixed her eyes for a moment upon a small sunspot on the carpet; then she got up and lowered the window-blind a little, to obliterate it. Presently, in the same mild voice, answering my question, she said, “Never!” “I hope your cousin repaid you your money.” “I don’t care for it now,” she said, looking away from me. “You don’t care for your money?” “For going to Europe.” “Do you mean that you would not go if you could?” “I can’t--I can’t,” said Caroline Spencer. “It is all over; I never think of it.” “He never repaid you, then!” I exclaimed. “Please--please,” she began. But she stopped; she was looking toward the door. There had been a rustling aud a sound of steps in the hall. I also looked toward the door, which was open, and now admitted another person, a lady, who paused just within the threshold. Behind her came a young man. The lady looked at me with a good deal of fixedness, long enough for my glance to receive a vivid impression of herself. Then she turned to Caroline Spencer, and, with a smile and a strong foreign accent,-- “Excuse my interruption!” she said. “I knew not you had company, the gentleman came in so quietly.” With this she directed her eyes toward me again. She was very strange; yet my first feeling was that I had seen her before. Then I perceived that I had only seen ladies who were very much like her. But I had seen them very far away from Grimwinter, and it was an odd sensation to be seeing her here. Whither was it the sight of her seemed to transport me? To some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian _quatrième_,--to an open door revealing a greasy antechamber, and to Madame leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee. Miss Spencer’s visitor was a very large woman, of middle age, with a plump, dead-white face, and hair drawn back _a la chinoise_. She had a small penetrating eye, and what is called in French an agreeable smile. She wore an old pink cashmere dressing-gown, covered with white embroideries, and, like the figure in my momentary vision, she was holding it together in front with a bare and rounded arm and a plump and deeply dimpled hand. “It is only to spick about my _café_,” she said to Miss Spencer, with her agreeable smile. “I should like it served in the garden under the leetle tree.”