of regret, one might fancy, sank and lay dead. The October colours, a
faint haze of smoky mist, the pale blue of the distant sky, the brown
moist earth, were gentle, mild, washed with the fading year's regretful
tears; the cries of the children, the rhythmic splash of the fountain
throbbed behind the colours like some hidden orchestra behind the
curtain at the play; the statues in the garden, like fragments of the
white bolster clouds that swung so lazily from tree to tree; had no
meaning in that misty air beyond the background that they helped to
fill. The year, thus idly, with so pleasant a melancholy, was slipping
into decay.

Sarah would watch. Then, without a word, she would slip from her seat,
and, walking solemnly, rather haughtily, would join some group of
children. Day after day the same children came to the gardens, and they
all of them knew Sarah by now. Hortense, in her turn also, sitting,
stiff and superior, would watch. She would see Sarah's pleasant
approach, her smile, her amiability. Very soon, however, there would be
trouble--some child would cry out; there would be blows; nurses would
run forward, scoldings, protests, captives led away weeping ... and then
Sarah would return slowly to her seat, her gaze aloof, cynical, remote.
She would carefully explain to Hortense the reason of the uproar. She
had done nothing--her conscience was clear. These silly little idiots.
She would break into French, culled elaborately from Hortense, would end
disdainfully--"mais, voilà,"--very old for her age.

Hortense was vicious, selfish, crude in her pursuit of pleasure,
entirely unscrupulous, but, as the days passed, she was, in spite of
herself, conscious of some half-acknowledged, half-decided terror of
Sarah's possibilities.