Vanderlyn also recalled, with almost the same surprise and discomfort as he had experienced at the time itself, the way in which Margaret Pargeter, so refined and so delicately bred, had discussed all the material details connected with their coming adventure--details from which the American diplomatist himself had shrunk, and which he would have done almost anything to spare her. "There is one person, and one alone," she had said with some decision, "who must know. I must tell Adele de Lera--she must have my address, for I cannot remain without news of my boy a whole week. As for Tom"--she had flushed, and then gone on steadily--"Tom will believe that I am going to stay with Adele at Marly-le-Roi, and my letters will be sent to her house. Besides," she had added, "Tom himself is going away, to England, for a fortnight." To the man then walking by her side, and even now, as he was remembering it all, the discussion was inexpressibly odious. "But do you think," he had ventured to ask, "that Madame de Lera will consent? Remember, Peggy, she is Catholic, and what is more, a pious Catholic." "Of course she won't like it--of course she won't approve! But I'm sure--in fact, Laurence, I _know_--that she will consent to forward my letters. She understands that it would make no difference--that I should think of some other plan for getting them. Should she refuse at the last moment--but--but she will not refuse--" and her face--the fair, delicately-moulded little face Vanderlyn loved--had become flooded with colour. For the first time since he had known her, he had realised that there was a side to her character of which he was ignorant, and yet?--and yet Laurence Vanderlyn knew Margaret Pargeter too well, his love of her implied too intimate a knowledge, for him not to perceive that something lay behind her secession from an ideal of conduct to which she had clung so unswervingly and for such long years. During the four days which had elapsed between then and now,--days of agitation, of excitement, and of suspense,--he had more than once asked himself whether it were possible that certain things which all the world had long known concerning Tom Pargeter had only just become revealed to Tom Pargeter's wife. He hoped, he trusted, this was not so; he had no desire to owe her surrender to any ignoble longing for reprisal. The world, especially that corner of Vanity Fair which takes a frankly materialistic view of life and of life's responsibilities, is shrewder than we generally credit, and the diplomatist's intimacy with the Pargeter household had aroused but small comment in the strange polyglot society in which lived, by choice, Tom Pargeter, the cosmopolitan millionaire who was far more of a personage in Paris and in the French sporting world than he could ever have hoped to be in England.