The heart-broken abandonment with which she said this was a sore trial to me; but though love may be deceived, vanity is ever vigilant, and vanity saved me. Yet I left her with an aching sense of having been a brute, and on the morning of my departure from Paris, as I said good-bye to William and Dora, I spoke somewhat seriously of Semiramis. Dora, Dora-like, had believed in her all along,--not having enjoyed William's opportunities of studying her,--and she reproached me with being rather hard-hearted. "Nonsense," said William, "if she really cared, wouldn't she have been up to bid you good-bye?" The words were hardly gone from his lips when there came a little knock at the door. It was Semiramis; she had come to say good-bye. Was it in nature not to be touched? "Good-bye," she said, as we stood a moment alone in the hall. "I shall always think of you; you shall not be to me as a ship that has passed in the night, though to me you have behaved very like an iceberg." We parted in tears and kisses, and I lived for some weeks with that sense of having been a Nero, till two months after I received a much glazed and silvered card to the usual effect. And so I ceased to repine for the wound I had made in the heart of Semiramis Wilcox. Of another whom I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat--"Mademoiselle Deschapelles--Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true enough. For you were in truth a very hard-working little dressmaker, and I well remember how impressed I was to sit beside you, as you plied your needle on some gown that must be finished by the evening, and meditate on the quaint contrast between your almost Puritanic industry and your innocent love of pleasure. I don't think I ever met a more conscientious little woman than little Pauline Deschapelles. There was but one drawback to our intercourse. She didn't know a word of English, and I couldn't speak a word of French. So we had to make shift to love without either language. But sometimes Pauline would throw down her stitching in amused impatience, and, going to her dainty secretaire, write me a little message in the simplest baby French--which I would answer in French which would knit her brows for a moment or two, and then send her off in peals of laughter. It WAS French! I know. Among the bric-a-brac of my heart I still cherish some of those little slips of paper with which we made international love--question and answer. "Vous allez m'oublier, et ne plus penser a moi--ni me voir. Les hommes--egoistes--menteurs, pas dire la verite..." so ran the questions, considerably devoid of auxiliary verbs and such details of construction. "Je serais jamais t'oublier," ran the frightful answers! Dear Pauline! Shall I ever see her again? She was but twenty-six. She may still live. CHAPTER XIV