quick calculation. Forty-eight from eighty-eight, forty--a young thing,
perhaps ten--ten and forty, fifty. Clara was virtually admitting that
she was fifty, and if she owned to that, she must be nearer sixty. In
other words, she must have been well over thirty when she had married
Greifenstein. She was certainly wonderfully well preserved. And yet
Greifenstein had more than once told his cousin that he had married his
wife when she was a widow five and twenty years of age. This was the
first occasion upon which Clara had ever let fall a word which could
serve as a starting-point in the calculation, and though the baroness
was the best and kindest of mortals she would not have been a woman if
she had failed to notice the statement, or to draw from it such
conclusions as it offered to her ingenuity.

'The people who profit by the pardon will be old men,' she remarked.

'Old?' repeated Clara with a scarcely perceptible start. 'Not so very.
They may be less than sixty--a man of sixty is still young at that age.
I wonder whether any of them will profit by the permission to return.
What do you think, Therese?'

The question was asked with every show of interest, and the baroness
raised her quiet eyes from her work. She and Clara very rarely called
each other by their first names. They generally avoided the difficulty
by a plentiful use of the convenient designation of cousin. Frau von
Greifenstein evidently meant to be more than usually confidential, and
her companion wondered what was coming, and began to feel nervous.

'Really,' she answered, 'I do not know. I suppose that a man who has
been expelled from his country and exiled for many years, would
naturally take the first opportunity of returning. I should think it