"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"

"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.

"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over
life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her
was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never
still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and
carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the
horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated
upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him
this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat
beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had
been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan-
Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage
into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and
coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared,
and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note for
him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the roses,
she never has written one since."

"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"

"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was
distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.
He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next
morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't
be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country
where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself,
'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later