MRS. MOSTYN had changed little since he had last seen her five years ago in London. Her hair, under the laces of her cap, was whiter; her rosiness and plumpness—her little hands were especially fat—more accentuated: but the gaiety and kindness were the same. As much as in the past she entered into all his interests: asked questions about his three years at the English embassy in Rome, about his recent travels, what he had done, what he intended to do. When all reminiscences were over, all plans discussed, and when Mrs. Mostyn had sketched for him, with her crisp, nipping definitiveness, the people of the neighborhood, Damier, who during all the talk had kept the album in his hand, his forefinger between the leaves at the place where the enchanted photograph had looked at him, said, opening the book: “I have been immersing myself in the past. Is anything so full of its feeling as an old photograph-album? ÇÀ sent le temps, and I have made a discovery there. Who is this?” He held out the opened page to her, and Mrs. Mostyn, adjusting her eye-glasses, looked.

“Ah, yes. Is she not charming?”

“She has charmed me. She is wonderful.”

“Her story was certainly rather wonderful. And she always charmed me, too, though I knew her only slightly, and saw her for only a short time. I met her in Paris when I was there with my husband. She was a Miss Chanfrey—Clara Chanfrey, a younger branch of the Bectons, you know. Clara had come out in London the year before. Lady Chanfrey, an ambitious woman, had, I fancy, determined on a brilliant match for her, and it seemed about to be realized, for Lord Pemleigh followed them to Paris, where Clara’s beauty made a furor—she was thought lovelier than the Empress. As I remember her there was really no comparison; she was far lovelier. I can see her now: one night at the Tuileries—she wore a white gauze dress and lilies-of-the-valley in her hair; and at the opera, Lord Pemleigh in the box, a hard, impassive man, but he was, report said, desperately enamoured; and, again, riding in the Bois in the flowing habit of the time. There was an air of serious blitheness about her; yet under the blitheness I felt always an eagerness, a waiting. She always seemed to be waiting, and to smile and talk pour passer le temps—to make the something that was coming come more quickly. Poor child! it came.”

“She married Lord Pemleigh?” Damier asked, as Mrs. Mostyn paused, her eyes vague with memories.

“No; don’t you remember? He married little Ethel Dunstan—but only after years had passed. No; she did an extraordinary thing—a dreadful thing. She eloped—ran away with a French artist, a man of no family, no fortune. He was introduced to the Chanfreys in Paris, and painted Clara’s portrait. Very clever it was thought, rather in the style of Manet; a full-length portrait—I saw it—of Clara in a white lawn dress with a green ribbon around her waist and a green ribbon in her black hair, and at her throat an emerald locket. Perhaps his very difference charmed her, and the distance that separated his world from hers made her unable to see him clearly; he was, too, extremely handsome. No explanations are needed of why he fell in love; the wealth and the position he hoped through her to attain were sufficient reasons, to say nothing of her beauty. At all events, Clara proudly avowed that they loved each other. One can only imagine the storm. The Chanfreys took her back to England; he followed them; and she ran away with him and married him. Her family never forgave her. Her father and mother died without ever seeing her again, and she refused the small allowance they offered her. Since those days I have heard only vaguely of her, and heard only unhappy things. The man, Jules Vicaud, was a talented brute. With her all had been glamour, charm, romance, the sense of generous trust; with him calculation and selfishness. He treated her abominably when he found that he had gained nothing with her; and he was idle, extravagant, dissipated. They became terribly poor. It was a sordid, a horrible story;—a violet dragged in the mud.”

Damier had listened in silence; now, as Mrs. Mostyn handed him back the album, and as, once more, the steady gaze met his, “I cannot associate her with the gutter,” he said, “nor can I understand this violet stooping to it. I should have imagined her too fastidious, too intelligent, and, if you will, too conventional to be for one moment dazzled by a shoddy bohemian.”

“Oh,” sighed Mrs. Mostyn, “has delicacy ever been a certificate of safety? She was fastidious, she was intelligent, she was conventional; but she was also idealistic, impulsive, ignorant—far more ignorant than a modern girl would be. Her knowledge of any other world than her own was so vague that the very carefulness of her breeding made her unconscious of its lack in others; differences she would have thought significant only of his greatness and her own littleness. She dazzled herself more than he dazzled her, perhaps. And he was, then at least, more than the shoddy bohemian. He had grace, power,—I well remember him,—an apparent indifference to the more petty standards and tests of her world that no doubt seemed to her a splendid, courageous unworldliness. And then he came at a moment of rebellion, pain, and perplexity, as a contrast to the formality, the charmlessness of her English suitor. She did not love Lord Pemleigh; her resistance to the match had already embittered her relations with her mother—Lady Chanfrey was a high-spirited, clever, cynical woman. And then—and then—she fell in love with Jules Vicaud; that is, after all, the only final explanation of these stories.”

“And she ceased to love him?” He seemed now to interpret the gaze more fully. Did it not foresee? Did it not entreat—though so proudly?

“Ah, I don’t know. All I know is that she stuck to him, and that she was miserable. Poor, poor child!” Mrs. Mostyn repeated.

“And is she dead?” he asked after a little pause in which it seemed to him that they had thrown flowers on a long-forgotten grave.

Mrs. Mostyn looked out of the window at the summer sky and sunny garden, the effort of difficult recollection on her face.

“I really don’t know—I really can’t remember. So soon afterward my husband died; Lady Chanfrey died; I came here to live. I heard from time to time of her misfortunes—of her death I don’t think I heard; but for years now I have heard nothing. How many years ago is it? This is ‘95, and that was—oh, it must have been nearly twenty-eight years ago.”

“So that she would be now?”

“She would be forty-seven now. If she is alive the story of her life is over.”

“I wonder if it is. I wonder if she is alive.”

The gaze of the photograph, with all its calm, grew more profound, more significant.

“Could you find out?” he asked presently.

Mrs. Mostyn broke into a laugh that, with its cheery common sense, like a gay cockcrow announcing dawn, seemed to dispel the hallucinations of night, recall the reality of the present, and set them both firmly in their own epoch.

“My dear Eustace! What a dabbler in impressions you are! I won’t say dabbler—seeker-after.”

“Not after impressions,” said Damier, smiling a little sadly.

“And have you not found anything?” she asked.

“No; I don’t think I have.”

“Neither a religion, nor a work, nor a woman!” smiled Mrs. Mostyn. “You have always reminded me, Eustace, of that introspective Swiss gentleman of the journal. You are always seeking something to which you can give yourself unreservedly. But my sad little Clara, even if she would have meant something to you, came too early. She missed you by—how many years?—fifteen at least, Eustace; you were hardly more than a baby when that photograph was taken. But she may have had a daughter,—the daughter of the bohemian and the mondaine,—and you might find there an adventure of the heart.”

“Ah, I don’t care about a daughter—or about an adventure.”

Mrs. Mostyn glanced at his absorbed, delicate face with a smile baffled and quizzical. She controlled, however, any humorous queries, and said presently:

“Yes, I might try to find out. I might write to Mrs. Gaston; she knows Sir Molyneux Chanfrey, Clara’s brother,—a man I never liked,—and she could ask him.”

“Pray do.”

“But I don’t fancy Sir Molyneux is very easy to approach on the subject. He and his sister were never sympathetic.”

“I wish you would find out,” Damier repeated.

“I will, Eustace, and give you a letter of introduction to her if I ever find her,” smiled Mrs. Mostyn.