Longmore was obliged to wait a week in London for a ship. It was very hot, and he went out one day to Richmond. In the garden of the hotel at which he dined he met his friend Mrs. Draper, who was staying there. She made eager enquiry about Madame de Mauves; but Longmore at first, as they sat looking out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her questions and confined himself to other topics. At last she said she was afraid he had something to conceal; whereupon, after a pause, he asked her if she remembered recommending him, in the letter she had addressed him at Saint-Germain, to draw the sadness from her friend’s smile. “The last I saw of her was her smile,” he said--“when I bade her good-bye.” “I remember urging you to ‘console’ her,” Mrs. Draper returned, “and I wondered afterwards whether--model of discretion as you are--I hadn’t cut you out work for which you wouldn’t thank me.” “She has her consolation in herself,” the young man said; “she needs none that any one else can offer her. That’s for troubles for which--be it more, be it less--our own folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves hasn’t a grain of folly left.” “Ah don’t say that!”--Mrs. Draper knowingly protested. “Just a little folly’s often very graceful.” Longmore rose to go--she somehow annoyed him. “Don’t talk of grace,” he said, “till you’ve measured her reason!” For two years after his return to America he heard nothing of Madame de Mauves. That he thought of her intently, constantly, I need hardly say; most people wondered why such a clever young man shouldn’t “devote” himself to something; but to himself he seemed absorbingly occupied. He never wrote to her; he believed she wouldn’t have “liked” it. At last he heard that Mrs. Draper had come home and he immediately called on her. “Of course,” she said after the first greetings, “you’re dying for news of Madame de Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I heard from her two or three times during the year after your seeing her. She left Saint-Germain and went to live in the country on some old property of her husband’s. She wrote me very kind little notes, but I felt somehow that--in spite of what you said about ‘consolation’--they were the notes of a wretched woman. The only advice I could have given her was to leave her scamp of a husband and come back to her own land and her own people. But this I didn’t feel free to do, and yet it made me so miserable not to be able to help her that I preferred to let our correspondence die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year. Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young Frenchman whom I accidentally learned to be a friend of that charming sister of the Count’s, Madame Clairin. I lost no time in asking him what he knew about Madame de Mauves--a countrywoman of mine and an old friend. ‘I congratulate you on the friendship of such a person,’ he answered. ‘That’s the terrible little woman who killed her husband.’ You may