the less plainly at a crisis between them he could but wonder vainly
what it was on her part that prevented some practical protest or some
rupture. What did she suspect?--how much did she know? To what was she
resigned?--how much had she forgiven? How, above all, did she reconcile
with knowledge, or with suspicion, that intense consideration she had
just now all but assured him she entertained? "She has loved him once,"
Longmore said with a sinking of the heart, "and with her to love once is
to commit herself for ever. Her clever husband thinks her too prim. What
would a stupid poet call it?" He relapsed with aching impotence into the
sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable, immeasurable by his
own fretful logic. Suddenly he gave three passionate switches in the air
with his cane which made Madame de Mauves look round. She could hardly
have guessed their signifying that where ambition was so vain the next
best thing to it was the very ardour of hopelessness.

She found in her drawing-room the little elderly Frenchman, M. de
Chalumeau, whom Longmore had observed a few days before on the terrace.
On this occasion too Madame Clairin was entertaining him, but as her
sister-in-law came in she surrendered her post and addressed herself to
our hero. Longmore, at thirty, was still an ingenuous youth, and there
was something in this lady's large assured attack that fairly
intimidated him. He was doubtless not as reassured as he ought to have
been at finding he had not absolutely forfeited her favour by his want
of resource during their last interview, and a suspicion of her being
prepared to approach him on another line completed his distress.

"So you've returned from Brussels by way of the forest?" she archly
asked.

"I've not been to Brussels. I returned yesterday from Paris by the only