‘And from that to the time when I was the rage at the Students’ Theatre, it was easy,’ said La Chicot, with an insolent smile upon her full, red lips. ‘If I had any other man for my husband I should be the rage at one of the Boulevard Theatres, and the _Figaro_ would have an article about me every other week.’ ‘You have never had any fancy for going back to Auray, to see your old friends?’ asked the husband once, wondering at the cold egotism of the creature. ‘I never had a friend in Brittany for whom I cared that,’ answered Zaïre, snapping her fingers. ‘Every one ill-treated me. My father was a perambulating cider-vat--my poor mother--well, I can pity her, because she was so miserable--whined and whimpered. It was a mercy to all of us when the good God took her.’ ‘And you never had any one else to care for?’ asked Jack, in a speculative mood. ‘No lover, for instance?’ ‘Lover!’ cried La Chicot, her great eyes flashing upon him angrily. ‘What had I to do with a lover? I was but nineteen when I left that hole.’ ‘Lovers have been heard of even at that early age,’ suggested Jack, in his quietest tone; and after that his wife said no more about her past history. To-night, sitting in idle despondency, looking into the fire, John Treverton, master of Hazlehurst Manor, husband of a wife he adored, utterly dissociated from that reckless, happy-go-lucky Jack Chicot of Bohemian surroundings, for whom the good and evil of each day had been all-sufficient, and who had never dared to look forward to the inevitable to-morrow, let his thoughts slip back to the bygone days, and saw, as in a picture, those scenes of the past which had impressed themselves most vividly upon his mind when they happened. There was one incident in his married life which had made him wonder, for his wife had not been a woman of a sensitive temper, or easily moved to strong emotion, save when her own pleasure or her own interest was at stake. Yet in this particular instance she had shown herself as susceptible to pity and terror as a girl of seventeen, fresh from a convent school. They two, husband and wife, had been strolling one summer afternoon upon the quays and bridges, loitering to look at the traffic on the river, sitting to rest under the trees, or turning over the leaves of the old books upon the stalls, and so sauntering carelessly on till they came to the Pont Neuf. ‘Let us go across and look at Notre Dame,’ said the husband, for whom the old church had an inexhaustible charm. ‘Bah!’ cried the wife. ‘What a fancy you have for staring at old stones!’