“I only arrived last night,” she explained. “And I must remain more or less in quarantine, being an unprotected woman, till my friend Lady Louisa Mailing comes, or till my friends in Paris get to know I am here. But I always like a day or two of freedom before announcing myself—so that I can do the foolish things that Parisians would jeer at. I always go to the Louvre and look at the little laughing Faun and the Giaconda; and I always go down the Seine in a steamboat, and from the Madeleine to the Bastille on the top of an omnibus. Then I’m ready for my plunge.” “I should have thought that bath of innocence was in itself the Fountain of Youth,” said Huckaby. The least suspicion of a frown passed over Mrs. Fontaine’s candid brow. But she replied with a smile: “On the contrary, my friend. That is a penitential dipping in the waters of the past.” “Why penitential?” asked Quixtus. “Isn’t it wholesome discipline to give oneself pain sometimes?” Her face grew wistful. “To re-visit scenes where one has been happy—and sharpen the knife of memory?” “It is the instinct of the ascetic,” smiled Quixtus. “I suppose I have a bit of it,” she replied, demurely. Then her face brightened. “I don’t wear a hair shirt—I’ve got to appear in an evening gown sometimes—but I find an odd little satisfaction in doing penance. If I were a Roman Catholic I would embarrass my confessor.” Huckaby’s lips twitched in a smile beneath his moustache. If all the tales that Billiter told of Lena Fontaine were true, a confessor would be exceedingly embarrassed. He regarded her with admiration. She was an entirely different woman from the hard and contemptuous partner in iniquity to whom Billiter had introduced him before he left London. It had not been a pleasant interview—just the details of their Paris meeting arranged, the story of their past acquaintance rehearsed, and nothing more. Huckaby, descending her stairs with Billiter, had felt as if he had been whipped, and prophesied failure. She was not the woman for Quixtus. But Billiter grinned and bade him wait. He had waited, and now had the satisfaction of seeing Quixtus caught immediately in the gossamer web of her charm. He wondered, too, how she could have maintained her relations with so undesirable a person as Billiter, for whom he himself entertained a profound contempt. Billiter was unusually silent on the matter, letting it be vaguely understood that he had been in the Dragoon Guardsman’s set before running through his money, and that he had accidentally done her a service in later years. What that service was he declined to mention. Huckaby sniffed blackmail. That was the more likely influence keeping together a well-received woman of hidden life and a shabby and unpresentable sot like Billiter. He remembered that Billiter had confessed to a mysterious source of income. What more natural an explanation thereof than the fact that, having once surprised a woman’s secret and holding her reputation in his hands, he