trying to hold herself aloof. Her parents were obliged to return the hospitality they had accepted. When she appeared in a nile green gown, which she had only worn once at the Duchess of Béard's before the event which had upset her life, she saw in the women's looks that they were not genuinely sincere in the touching sympathy they expressed to her on every occasion. The new-comers in their set made a great deal of her with that easy freedom which results from the absence of a woman's husband. Although she was the least décolleté of all the women, she felt a new awkwardness, which recalled her début as a young girl, in feeling her shoulders exposed: shoulders, whose mother-of-pearl whiteness was greatly admired. She had the impression that this was not her place, and her personal success only half dispelled the idea. She felt it again, one day as she was walking with her children to Saint Martin d'Uriage. The closed châlet where she had spent so many peaceful summers, the church near-by, the charm of this hamlet lost in the woods, stirred her emotions which sensed the influence of places, as of people. She opened the chapel door, and in her prayer--very short because of her impatient companions--she had time to ask herself if this continual round of gayety were a normal existence for one in her position; if such habits of going about, of amusement and of pleasure, would not later spoil the precocious imagination of Marie Louise and Philippe, who, while rolling about in the grass and playing with the little peasants, were acquiring, along with good health, simplicity of heart. To her great astonishment, on the plane-tree avenue, the little boy, without bashfulness, asked when they would go home, but Marie Louise, blushing and cuddling up to her mother, said: "And papa?" "He is away, traveling," she replied evasively. The little girl, finding again an important association of her short past experience, became nervous and her little bosom heaved. "When I was a child," she said excitedly, "I lived here. Papa took me away, far away to the mountains. He carried me on his back when I was tired." "And me too," cried Philippe, who was not going to be left behind. "He laughed all the time," Marie Louise recalled again.