It was characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man was the evil of the day more sufficient to itself; and he would be the last to insist upon that discipline of conscience that burdens each successive dawn with a new heritage of regrets. Moreover, the dog had the right humour, when he was restored to it, to properly appreciate Ned’s immediate comprehension of rule one and only of the Brotherhood; and on his way home with Théroigne, the comedy of the situation did gradually so slake the turmoil of his soul as that he must try to win over his companion to regard the matter from anything but a tragic standpoint. In this he was but partly successful; for woman has a cast in her humorous perceptives that deprives her of the sense of proportion. “Is it so little a thing?” she said hotly. “But it was thy honour I fought to maintain. And no wonder, then, that men will take sport of that in us which they hold so cheap in themselves.” However, his mended view of the affair impressed her so far as that, meeting with the Englishman by the village fountain on the morning following the orgy, she condescended to some distant notice of, and speech with, him. For, indeed, with her sex, to punish with silence is to wield a scourge of hand-stinging adders. Ned, serenely undisturbed by, if not unconscious of, a certain toneless hauteur, greeted Mademoiselle Lambertine with his usual politeness. He was not, in truth, greatly interested in this fine animal. He recognised in her no original quality that set her apart from her fellows. Beauty of an astonishing order was hers indeed--beauty as much of promise as of fulfilment. The little remaining _gaucherie_ of the hoyden dwelt with her only like a lingering brogue on the tongue of an expatriated Irishman. It was rough-and-tumble budding into a manner of caress. But beauty, save as it might contribute to the _motif_ of a picture, was no fire to raise this young man’s temperature, and in Théroigne’s presence he seemed only to breathe an opulent atmosphere of commonplace. She was glowing passion interpreted through colour--siennas and leafy browns, and golds like the reflection of sunsets; a dryad, a pagan, a liberal-limbed _tetonnière_. If she were ever to find herself a soul, he could imagine her standing out richly as a Rembrandt portrait against torn dark backgrounds. But at present she seemed to lack the setting that occasion might procure her. “Why do you toil this long way for water?” said he. “For the reason that monsieur travels,” she answered coldly. “Do I comprehend? I loiter up the channels of life seeking the spring-heads.” “Whence the waters gush sweet and clear. Down in the dull homesteads one draws only stagnation from the ground.” “Or from the barrels underground. Méricourt would do well, I think, to make this fountain its rendezvous.”