"How prompt you are!" she laughed. "No, not now. I have my lessons." "To-morrow, then?" "Perhaps," said the Lady of the Rose. "Perhaps----" Cartaret's face brightened. "That is," explained his hostess, "if you will not try to teach me English, sir." CHAPTER X AN ACCOUNT OF AN EMPTY PURSE AND A FULL HEART, IN THE COURSE OF WHICH THE AUTHOR BARELY ESCAPES TELLING A VERY OLD STORY C'est état bizarre de folie tendre qui fait que nous n'avons plus de pensée que pour des actes d'adoration. On devient véritablement un possédé que hante une femme, et rien n'existe plus pour nous à côté d'elle.--De Maupassant: _Un Soir_. The Lady's "perhaps" meant "yes," it seemed, for, when Cartaret called for her the next day, he found her ready to go to the Bois, and not the Lady only: hovering severely in the immediate background, like a thunder-cloud over a Spring landscape, was Chitta, wrapped in a shawl of marvelous lace, doubtless from her own country, and crowned with a brilliant bonnet unmistakably procured at some second-hand shop off the rue St. Jacques. The Lady noticed his expression of bewilderment and appeared a little annoyed by it. "Of course," she said, "Chitta accompanies us." Cartaret had to submit. "Certainly," said he. He proposed a taxi-cab to the Bois--he had visited the Mont de Piété--but the Lady would not hear of it; she was used to walking; she was a good walker; she liked to walk. "But it's miles," Cartaret protested. "It is nothing," said she. Her utmost concession was to go by tram to the _Arc_. It was a beautiful day in the Bois, with half of Paris there: carriages from the Faubourg St. Germain, motors of the smart set, hired conveyances full of tourists. The trees were a tender green; the footways crowded by the Parisian bourgeois, making a day of it with his family. Slim officers walked, in black jackets and red trousers, the calves of their legs compressed in patent-leather riding-leggings; women of the half-world showed brilliant toilettes that had been copied by ladies of the _haut monde_, who, driven past, wore them not quite so well. Grotesquely clipped French poodles rode in the carriages, and Belgian police-dogs in the automobiles; thin-nosed collies frolicked after their masters; here and there a tailless English sheep-dog waddled by, or a Russian boar-hound paced sedately; children played on the grass and dashed across the paths with a suddenness that threatened the safety of the adult pedestrians. Cartaret led the way into the less frequented portions of the great park beyond the Lac Inférieur. The Lady was pleasantly beside him, Chitta unpleasantly at his heels. "Don't you admit it's worth coming to see?" he began in English. "When I was here, under the stars, the other night----" "You must speak French," the Lady smilingly interrupted. "You must remember my promise to Chitta."