"I don't know that she does: but the mere fact of possible opposition might be enough to alarm the delicacy you have observed in her." "Ah--yes: on her boy's account." "Partly, doubtless, on her boy's account." "So that, if my brother objects to a divorce, all he has to do is to announce his objection? But, my dear sir, you are giving your case into my hands!" She flashed an amused smile on him. "Since you say you are Madame de Malrive's friend, could there be a better place for it?" As she turned her eyes on him he seemed to see, under the flitting lightness of her glance, the sudden concentrated expression of the ancestral will. "I am Fanny's friend, certainly. But with us family considerations are paramount. And our religion forbids divorce." "So that, inevitably, your brother will oppose it?" She rose from her seat, and stood fretting with her slender boot-tip the minute red pebbles of the path. "I must really go in: my mother will never forgive me for deserting her." "But surely you owe me an answer?" Durham protested, rising also. "In return for your purchases at my stall?" "No: in return for the trust I have placed in you." She mused on this, moving slowly a step or two toward the house. "Certainly I wish to see you again; you interest me," she said smiling. "But it is so difficult to arrange. If I were to ask you to come here again, my mother and uncle would be surprised. And at Fanny's--" "Oh, not there!" he exclaimed. "Where then? Is there any other house where we are likely to meet?" Durham hesitated; but he was goaded by the flight of the precious minutes. "Not unless you'll come and dine with me," he said boldly. "Dine with you? _Au cabaret?_ Ah, that would be diverting--but impossible!" "Well, dine with my cousin, then--I have a cousin, an American lady, who lives here," said Durham, with suddenly-soaring audacity. She paused with puzzled brows. "An American lady whom I know?" "By name, at any rate. You send her cards for all your charity bazaars." She received the thrust with a laugh. "We do exploit your compatriots." "Oh, I don't think she has ever gone to the bazaars." "But she might if I dined with her?" "Still less, I imagine." She reflected on this, and then said with acuteness: "I like that, and I accept--but what is the lady's name?" VI On the way home, in the first drop of his exaltation, Durham had said to himself: "But why on earth should Bessy invite her?" He had, naturally, no very cogent reasons to give Mrs. Boykin in support of his astonishing request, and could only, marvelling at his own growth in duplicity, suffer her to infer that he was really, shamelessly "smitten" with the lady he thus proposed to thrust upon her hospitality. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Boykin hardly gave herself time to pause upon his reasons. They were swallowed up in the fact that Madame de Treymes wished to dine with her, as the lesser luminaries vanish in the blaze of the sun.