But, ah how ill she looked--Lucy. The bounding heart fell again as though some dead weight were pressing it. Thin, worn, white; with dark circles round the eyes, and lips that seemed to have no life in them. For a moment Karl wondered whether he might not approach and question her: but he remembered his bargain with Colonel Cleeve. They did not see him: they were looking at some children in front of them; playing at "Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre." Karl pursued the path he was on, which would carry him away from their bench at right angles. He resolved that if they saw him he would go up and speak: if they did not, he must continue his way. And he had to continue it. Mrs. Cleeve, Who did not look to be in strong health either, seemed absorbed by the play and the childish voices chanting the chanson; Lucy had now bent her forehead upon her hand, as though some ache were there. Karl went on, out of sight, his brow aching too. "Bon jour, monsieur." The salutation, which had a touch of surprised pleasure in its tone, came from a natty-looking little Frenchwoman, with a thin red face and shrewd grey eyes. She might have been given five-and-thirty years: but in the register of her native _Mairie_ she would have been found hard upon forty. Sir Karl stopped. She was Lucy's maid: formerly Lucy's nurse. "C'est vous, Aglaé!" "Mais oui, monsieur." "I thought I saw Mrs. and Miss Cleeve sitting on a bench just now," continued Karl; changing his language. "Are you staying in Paris?" "Oh, very long since," replied Aglaé, to whom both languages were nearly alike. "Our apartment is close by, sir--a small house in the Avenue d'Antin. The delight to find myself in my proper land again, where I can go about without one of those vilain bonnets and hear no street gamins hoot at me for it, is untellable." "I understood that Colonel Cleeve and his family had gone to Egypt for the winter," observed Karl. "To Egypt, or to some other place of barbarisme: so it was projected, sir. But my young lady, Miss Lucy, is not strong enough to be taken." "What is the matter with her?" asked Karl, with assumed quietness. "The matter? Oh! The matter is, that she has got no happiness left in her heart, sir," cried Aglaé, explosively, as if in deep resentment against things in general. "It's dried up. And if they don't mind, she will just go unwarningly out of life. That's my opinion: and, mind, sir, I do not go to say it without reason." A slight blush mantled in Karl's face. He seemed to be watching a red paper kite, that was sailing beneath the blue sky. "They see it now, both of them; the Colonel and Madame; they see that she's just slipping away from them, and _they_ are ill. Ah but! the senseless--what you call it--distinctions--that the English set up!" "But what is the cause?" asked Karl. Though it seemed to him that he could discern quite well without being answered. Aglaé threw her shrewd eyes into his.