"She had failed you know to get her sister back to Pavannes'
house, where she would have fallen an easy victim. Bezers, who
knew Madame d'O, prevented that. Then that fiend slipped back
with her knife; thinking that in the common butchery the crime
would be overlooked, and never investigated, and that Mirepoix
would be silent!"

I said nothing. I was stunned. Yet I believed the story. When
I went over the facts in my mind I found that a dozen things,
overlooked at the time and almost forgotten in the hurry of
events, sprang up to confirm it. M. de Pavannes'--the other M.
de Pavannes'--suspicions had been well founded. Worse than
Bezers was she? Ay! worse a hundred times. As much worse as
treachery ever is than violence; as the pitiless fraud of the
serpent is baser than the rage of the wolf.

"I thought," Croisette added softly, not looking at me, "when I
discovered that you had gone off with her, that I should never
see you again, Anne. I gave you up for lost. The happiest
moment of my life I think was when I saw you come back."

"Croisette," I whispered piteously, my cheeks burning, "let us
never speak of her again."

And we never did--for years. But how strange is life. She and
the wicked man with whom her fate seemed bound up had just
crossed our lives when their own were at the darkest. They
clashed with us, and, strangers and boys as we were, we ruined
them. I have often asked myself what would have happened to me
had I met her at some earlier and less stormy period--in the