"Hold up your hands and swear secrecy, every one of you!" cried Louis. "But who will absolve me from breaking the commandment? You will never have any respect for me again--you remember the rule--all liars shall have their portion--don't you?" "If madame will permit me," said Lemois with a low bow, "I will be her father-confessor, for I alone of all this group know how good she really is." "Very well, I take you at your word, Fra Lemois, and to prove how good _you_ are, you shall send me the Satsuma with your compliments, and pick from my collection anything that pleases you. But you must first let me have a cigarette. Wait"--she twisted back her arm and drew a gold case from the side pocket of her jacket--"yes, I have one of my own--one I rolled myself, and I cure my own tobacco too, if you please. No! no more Burgundy" (she had declined my carefully selected Chablis and had drank the heavier wine with the rest of us). "That Romanée Conti I know, and it generally gets into my head, and I don't like anything in my head except what I put there myself. What did you want me to do? Oh, yes, tell you that story of my youth. "Well, one day my dear husband received a letter from an English officer, a dear friend of his with whom he had had the closest relations when they were both stationed in Borneo. This letter told us that his daughter, whom, as we knew, had been captured by the Dyaks when she was a child of eight, had been found some three years before by a scouting party and returned to the English agent at the principal seaport, the name of which I forget. Since that time she had been living with a relative, who had sent her to school. She had now completed her education, the letter went on to say, and was on her way back to England to join him, he being an invalided officer on half-pay. Before reaching him he wanted her to see something of the world, particularly of French life, and knew of no one with whom he would be more willing to trust her than ourselves. She was just grown--in her eighteenth year--and, although she had passed seven years of her life among a wild tribe, was still an English girl of prepossessing appearance. "Well, she came--a beautifully formed, graceful creature, with flashing black eyes, a clear skin, and with a certain barbaric litheness when she moved that always reminded me of a panther, it was so measured, and had such meaning in it. She brought some expensive clothes, but no décolleté dresses of any kind, which surprised me, and when I offered to lend her my own--we were of about the same size--she refused politely but firmly, which surprised me all the more, and went right on wearing her high-necked gowns, which, while good in themselves--for her people were not poor--were not exactly the kind of toilettes my husband and my guests had been accustomed to--certainly not at dinners of twenty.