A mild January day on the terrace of St. Germains. After a morning of hoar-frost the sun was shining brightly on the terrace, and on the panorama it commands. A pleasant light lay on the charming houses that front the skirts of the forest, on the blue-gray windings of the Seine, on the groves of leafless poplars interwoven with its course, on the plain with its thickly sown villages, on the height of Mont Valerien, behind which lay Paris. In spite of the sunshine, however, it was winter, and there was no movement in St. Germains. The terrace and the road leading from it to the town were deserted; and it was easy to see from the aspect of the famous hotel at the corner of the terrace that, although not closed, it despaired of visitors. Only a trio of French officers in the far distance of the terrace, and a white-capped _bonne_ struggling against the light wind with a basket on her arm, offered any sign of life to the observant eyes of a young man who was briskly pacing up and down that section of the terrace which abuts on the hotel. The young man was Philip Meryon. His dark tweed suit and fur waistcoat disclosed a figure once singularly agile and slender, on which self-indulgence was now beginning to tell. Nevertheless, as the _bonne_ passed him she duly noted and admired his pictorial good looks, opining at the same time that he was not French. Why was he there? She decided in her own mind that he was there for an assignation, by which she meant, of course, a meeting with a married woman; and she smiled the incorrigible French smile. Assignation or no, she would have seen, had she looked closer, that the young man in question was in no merely beatific or expectant frame of mind. Meryon's look was a look both of excitement--as of one under the influence of some news of a startling kind--and of anxiety. Would she come? And if she came would he be able to bring and hold her to any decision, without--without doing what even he shrank from doing? For that ill chance in a thousand which Meynell had foreseen, and hoped, as mortals do, to baffle, had come to pass. That morning, a careless letter enclosing the payment of a debt, and written by a young actor, who had formed part of one of the bohemian parties at the Abbey, during the summer, and had now been playing for a week in the Markborough theatre, had given Meryon the clue to the many vague conjectures or perplexities which had already crossed his mind with regard to Hester's origin and history. * * * * *