the gossip didn't stop, and the name stuck, too, since it conveyed
a very certain and very significant sort of fact, and of course the
Venetian episode was talked about in the houses frequented by my
mother. It was talked about from a royalist point of view with a
kind of respect. It was even said that the inspiration and the
resolution of the war going on now over the Pyrenees had come out
from that head. . . Some of them talked as if she were the guardian
angel of Legitimacy. You know what royalist gush is like."

Mr. Blunt's face expressed sarcastic disgust. Mills moved his head
the least little bit. Apparently he knew.

"Well, speaking with all possible respect, it seems to have
affected my mother's brain. I was already with the royal army and
of course there could be no question of regular postal
communications with France. My mother hears or overhears somewhere
that the heiress of Mr. Allegre is contemplating a secret journey.
All the noble Salons were full of chatter about that secret
naturally. So she sits down and pens an autograph: 'Madame,
Informed that you are proceeding to the place on which the hopes of
all the right thinking people are fixed, I trust to your womanly
sympathy with a mother's anxious feelings, etc., etc.,' and ending
with a request to take messages to me and bring news of me. . . The
coolness of my mother!"

Most unexpectedly Mills was heard murmuring a question which seemed
to me very odd.

"I wonder how your mother addressed that note?"