would suppose."

He vaguely thought that he would both sound and warn Lady Henry. Warn
her of what? He happened on the way home to have been thrown with a
couple of Indian officers whose personal opinion of Harry Warkworth was
not a very high one, in spite of the brilliant distinction which the
young man had earned for himself in the Afridi campaign just closed. But
how was he to hand that sort of thing on to Lady Henry?--and because he
happened to have seen her lady companion and Harry Warkworth together?
No doubt Mademoiselle Julie was on her employer's business.

Yet the little encounter added somehow to his already lively curiosity
on the subject of Lady Henry's companion. Thanks to a remarkable
physical resemblance, he was practically certain that he had guessed the
secret of Mademoiselle Le Breton's parentage. At any rate, on the
supposition that he had, his thoughts began to occupy themselves with
the story to which his guess pointed.

Some thirty years before, he had known, both in London and in Italy, a
certain Colonel Delaney and his wife, once Lady Rose Chantrey, the
favorite daughter of Lord Lackington. They were not a happy couple. She
was a woman of great intelligence, but endowed with one of those
natures--sensitive, plastic, eager to search out and to challenge
life--which bring their possessors some great joys, hardly to be
balanced against a final sum of pain. Her husband, absorbed in his
military life, silent, narrowly able, and governed by a strict
Anglicanism that seemed to carry with it innumerable "shalts" and "shalt
nots," disagreeable to the natural man or woman, soon found her a tiring
and trying companion. She asked him for what he could not give; she
coquetted with questions he thought it impious to raise; the persons she