"It is often unjust," he said, "and always goes too far. Though I don't know what we should have done at Winchester without it--even without the injustice and occasional savagery. Yes, Mrs. Allonby, the savagery. But that, I hear, is now very rare. You need not shrink from sending your boy to Winchester. It will make a man of him; though he will be let down very gently to what we were." It was during this discourse that Ermengarde discovered what she had been too much preoccupied while assisting at the execution of Miss Boundrish to think out before, though all the time she had been conscious of a subtle change in the thin man's appearance--a change so great that every one who saw him that morning was so much struck by it as to look twice, even three times at him--his beard was gone. Now why, she pondered, had Mr. Welbourne's beard taken sudden flight? Had he foreboded a personal encounter with Miss Boundrish, and thought it well to give as little hold to her vengeance as possible? "Ah!" she said, suddenly divining another cause, "I see that you are no longer afraid of sore throat, Mr. Welbourne. That is good. First, because it means that your health is restored, secondly, because it is a portent of spring." "Sore throat?" he murmured, bewildered. "The Riviera throat only comes in the first weeks. But----" his hand suddenly went up to the newly reaped chin, when crimson of the deepest dye suffused and betrayed him. "Quite so," he added vaguely--"yes; it--it was a protection--oh!--the _mistral_--ah--invalid ways--indolence----" "I congratulate you on all counts," she said in a kind voice, wondering who was the object of Mr. Welbourne's passion, a sudden paralyzing fear suggesting herself. But no; that would be too terrible; M. Isidore, the Anarchist and the thin man, in those few, short weeks--Fate could hardly be so cruel as all that! And at his age! But he looked horribly young without the beard, and there was a certain gallant and knightly suggestion in the elegantly trimmed moustache left. There was no doubt that the thin man--no longer so thin and not at all so lame--was going forth in that moustache, conquering and to conquer. He had been heard to condemn the present clean-shaven mode as womanish. She had perhaps been too filial, too confiding with him, under the shadow of that venerable beard, and he had mistaken her. Then her eyes fell on the roses by Agatha's plate; she remembered that those two had often been elaborately unconscious of each other's presence lately; she remembered a long succession of gentle judgments on the woman of mystery's vagaries, and many delicate allusions to her beauty and charm, and in a flash she knew. Poor Mr. Welbourne! This was indeed tragedy.