“Allègre died and. . . ” murmured Mills in an interested manner. “And she had to dismount,” broke in Mr. Blunt grimly. “Dismount right into the middle of it. Down to the very ground, you understand. I suppose you can guess what that would mean. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She had never been on the ground. She . . . ” “Aha!” said Mills. “Even eh! eh! if you like,” retorted Mr. Blunt, in an unrefined tone, that made me open my eyes, which were well opened before, still wider. He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its attitude of alarmed chastity. “Nothing escapes his penetration. He can perceive a haystack at an enormous distance when he is interested.” I thought this was going rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached for his tobacco pouch. “But that’s nothing to my mother’s interest. She can never see a haystack, therefore she is always so surprised and excited. Of course Doña Rita was not a woman about whom the newspapers insert little paragraphs. But Allègre was the sort of man. A lot came out in print about him and a lot was talked in the world about her; and at once my dear mother perceived a haystack and naturally became unreasonably absorbed in it. I thought her interest would wear out. But it didn’t. She had received a shock and had received an impression by means of that girl. My mother has never been treated with impertinence before, and the aesthetic impression must have been of extraordinary strength. I must suppose that it amounted to a sort of moral revolution, I can’t account for her proceedings in any other way. When Rita turned up in Paris a year and a half after Allègre’s death some shabby journalist (smart creature) hit upon the notion of alluding to her as the heiress of Mr. Allègre. ‘The heiress of Mr. Allègre has taken up her residence again amongst the treasures of art in that Pavilion so well known to the élite of the artistic, scientific, and political world, not to speak of the members of aristocratic and even royal families. . . ’ You know the sort of thing. It appeared first in the _Figaro_, I believe. And then at the end a little phrase: ‘She is alone.’ She was in a fair way of becoming a celebrity of a sort. Daily little allusions and that sort of thing. Heaven only knows who stopped it. There was a rush of ‘old friends’ into that garden, enough to scare all the little birds away. I suppose one or several of them, having influence with the press, did it. But the gossip didn’t stop, and the name stuck, too, since it conveyed a very certain and very significant sort of fact, and of course the Venetian episode was talked about in the houses frequented by my mother.