“I rarely forgot you in my most insane moments. I thought of my position, of the traditions of my family. I would have freed her if I could, and then fled her presence; for I felt it would be impossible to make this girl your daughter, though her name was stainless, and she was superbly beautiful, and gifted with talents of a certain kind. But I could not rescue her by money from the clutches of the old wolf who had laid a claw upon her. It would have needed thousands, and I should perhaps have left myself penniless, and--and looking very like a fool,” Paul added, with a cynical laugh. “You married the girl, then?” said Mrs. Desfrayne eagerly, anxious to ascertain the exact position of her son, and desirous of hurrying him to an immediate acknowledgment. “I offered to assist her in taking flight to Paris. At least, I believed the suggestion was mine, but later I recollected that the entire plan was arranged by herself, under advice of the old woman who attended her. She was restless and impatient until we had completed every preparation to leave Florence forever, as she intended. I cannot realize how it came about that I was like a puppet in her hands.” Mrs. Desfrayne shrugged her shoulders with a kind of disdainful compassion. “We started late on a Friday, the opera being closed on that night, and arrived safely at the frontier. Then we suddenly discovered that the old woman had not been provided with a passport. The girl whom I had undertaken to assist wept and sobbed with terror.” “A preconcerted affair, my poor Paul.” “No doubt. We agreed that there was nothing to be done but to leave the old attendant behind with money and instructions to follow as early as she possibly could, and then to pursue our journey. For more than a week we continued our flight. It seemed to me then more like a strange, fascinating dream, than an incident of my real every-day life. I fell more and more under the spell of this beautiful siren’s beauty and insidious charm of manner, and by the time we reached Paris I had completely lost my senses. About three days after we reached our destination, I made her my wife; we were married at the British embassy.” Paul’s mother clasped her hands with a cry. The point at which she had desired to arrive even now electrified her. She could not have explained her own feelings at that moment. Her brain seemed in a whirl from the shock. The story gave her the idea that it was like one of those fantastical dreams, where all the personages who appear perform the most improbable tricks, and everybody apparently does the most unlikely acts. “May I inquire the name of this amiable young person?” she asked, and her own voice struck her as being strange.