Carlita laughed scornfully, and her mother continued: “Annette took the information with a blank calmness; no one could tell what her feelings were. She continued her busy life for three more years, and then one day a fashionable gentleman, called Van Tienhoven, visited her. In the most guarded and respectful manner he told her that he had just returned from France; that while there he had, through the influence of powerful friends, visited the Court of Versailles several times, and that on two occasions he had seen there, in close attendance upon the King, Mr. St. Ange, or, he added, if not Mr. St. Ange, the most perfect duplicate of that gentleman that can be imagined. Annette preserved her composure until his confidence was closed, then gave it an unqualified denial. She told Van Tienhoven that St. Ange’s lawyer had assured her of the death of her husband; and begged him not to give publicity to the suspicion that he still lived. She showed him how painful it must be to her, how unfortunate for her daughters, and she emphatically declared her own belief in Mr. St. Ange’s death. He gave her his word of honour to observe strict silence on the subject; and the Van Tienhovens are all gentlemen. I have no doubt the promise of secrecy was kept. “But Annette became restless and unhappy, and both her grandmother and my father advised her to go to Paris. She went, taking with her Jonaca, the eldest of her daughters, who had always been the favourite of St. Ange. In less than four months she was in New York again. She came back without Jonaca, and dressed in the most pronounced widow’s costume. She said unequivocally that her husband was dead, and that she had left Jonaca at a fine Parisian school; her father’s friends having strongly urged her to do so, promising to care well for the girl. No one had any right to doubt Annette’s statement, but mother told me that from the first there was a doubt. It was undefined and unspoken, but it permeated society; and Annette soon felt it. One day after some particularly disagreeable incident, she came to my mother and told her what had occurred; and mother said, ‘Dear, what does it matter? _You_ know that Achille is dead, do you not?’ And she answered in a sullen, angry way, ‘Sapphira, he is as dead to me as if he lay at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay. There is no truer widow in all America than Annette St. Ange. And then she pulled the widow’s veil from her bonnet, and the widow’s cap from her head, and flung them with passionate scorn far from her. What confidence followed this act mother never fully told me; but I gathered from what she said that she had been compelled to give up Jonaca, who had been placed in a convent for proper education, and that the interview with her husband had been extremely painful. But he kissed her hand at the close of the negotiations, and he sent servants in magnificent livery to attend to her luggage and passports and all the