"I don't believe you care a button for the Dutch painters," he said with
a laugh. "But I shall certainly write you a letter."

She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as
she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an
agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant simply
that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the golden-
hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose
personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de
Mauves was silent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and
she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had
not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid
creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to
profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely,
she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up
her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she
had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the
garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was
entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache
and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the
house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as
they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-
fashioned epigram about "la vieille galanterie francaise"--then by a
sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was
doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to
come in. "I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at
Saint-Germain."

For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his