Madame Leroux, all smiles, had confirmed the news herself in each instance. Monsieur Leroux had taken the little tramway into Arcachon to blaze it abroad at his café. The three little pigtailed daughters fluttered about the villas of Les Pins in their red-and-white check frocks, twittering like starlings on the subject of the _fiançailles_, and spreading the news that Mademoiselle Ouallshe was sending to Paris for presents for each of them, and had said that they were to call her Tante Agathe! The wedding was for soon--for almost immediately! Excitement rose higher and higher; it might be observed that the delight seemed, if anything, on the French side; the astonishment on that of the English visitors. Little Mr. Brown turned from his plans for furnishing the woodcutter's hut for himself to open his candid and bulging blue eyes upon this new event in the hotel. He was, as a matter of fact, the first of those who heard the news to refer to a certain element in it. "I say; look here," was his comment. "That chap's all right, I daresay; but are his people and all that quite class enough for the lady's family? I don't know about foreigners, of course. And of course I don't pretend to be Anybody, myself. But what'll her people at home think? Won't they----Well, _socially_, I should have thought it would have been considered a bit _Rum_!" Mrs. Cartwright told him, quickly and quietly, that this marriage was not complicated, on "the lady's" side, by any people at home, and turned to Olwen to confirm it. Olwen, who was wide-eyed with a mixture of feelings, which she was surprised to find were not all happy ones, agreed that Miss Walsh hadn't any relations. And presently Mrs. Cartwright was writing to her sisters: "_A marriage has been arranged between the French Sergeant and the Hotel Spinster I described to you in my last. I think an excellent plan. She wants marriage, he wants money. Translated into English, it is brutal and horrible. But these clear-eyed French make something so different out of all that._ "_She is madly in love with him, for the same reason that Eve fell in love with Adam in that Garden; he's the first man she's ever seen. The gap between their worlds is no wider than the gap between her and the world generally. Up to now (35, my dear!) she's belonged to the Great Unkissed._ "_He is proud of his achievement, and, consequently, proud of her. I expect he will make her an admirable husband. They'll live in this country, his people will be her people. He will be affectionate, and genuinely fond of her, as only a Frenchman can be fond of the wife who has brought him money, and at whom he would not have looked, but for her income!_" Olwen, behind that startled gaze of hers, was realizing that she, and she alone, was responsible for this projected marriage and for the way in which it would turn out, whether for good or ill.