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4th October.

Inexplicable! Inexplicable! Did they marry after all? Could there have been some gigantic misunderstanding? I paid a pilgrimage this morning which hitherto I had deferred, I know not precisely why. I went to the old house in the Rue d’Alva–where she lived, our Comtesse. And the sight of its grim, historic frontal made twenty years seem as yesterday. I meant to content myself with a mere glimpse at the barred windows, but the impulse seized me to ring the bell which I used to ring so often. It was a foolish, fantastic impulse, but I obeyed it. I found it was occupied by an Englishman, a Mr. Venables–there seem to be more English here than in my time–and I sent in my card and asked if I might see the famous dining-room. There was no objection raised, my host was most courteous, my name, he said, was familiar to him; he is evidently proud of his dilapidated old palace, and has had the grace to save it from the attentions of the upholsterer. No! twenty years have produced very little change in the room where we had so many pleasant sittings. The ancient stamped leather on the walls is perhaps a trifle more ragged, the old oak panels not blacker–that were impossible–but a trifle more worm-eaten; it is the same room. I must have seemed a sad boor to my polite cicerone as I stood, hat in hand, and silently took in all the old familiar details. The same smell of mildewed antiquity, I could almost believe the same furniture. And indeed my host tells me that he took over the house as it was, and that some of the chairs and tables are scarcely more youthful than the walls. Yes, there by the huge fireplace was the same quaintly carved chair where she always sat. Ah, those delicious evenings when one was five-and-twenty. For the moment I should not have been surprised if she had suddenly taken shape before my eyes, in the old seat, the slim, girlish woman in her white dress, her hands folded in her lap, her quiet eyes gazing dreamily into the red fire, a subtile air of distinction in her whole posture…. She would be old now, I suppose. Would she? Ah no, she was not one of the women who grow old…. I caught up the thread of my host’s discourse just as he was pointing it with a sharp rap upon one of the most time-stained panels.

‘Behind there,’ he remarked, with pardonable pride, ‘is the secret passage where the Duc d’Alva was assassinated.’

I smiled apologetically.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know it. I should explain perhaps–my excuse for troubling you was not merely historic curiosity. I have more personal associations with this room. I spent some charming hours in it a great many years ago-‘ and for the moment I had forgotten that I was nearly fifty.

‘Ah,’ he said, with interest, ‘you know the late people, the Fontaines.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I am afraid I have never heard of them. I am very ancient. In my time it belonged to the Savaresse family.’

‘So I have heard,’ he said, ‘but that was long ago. I have only had it a few years. Fontaine my landlord bought it from them. Did you know M. le Comte!’

‘No,’ I answered, ‘Madame la Comtesse. She was left a widow very shortly after her marriage. I never knew M. le Comte.’

My host shrugged his shoulders.

‘From all accounts,’ he said, ‘you did not lose very much.’

‘It was an unhappy marriage,’ I remarked, vaguely, ‘most unhappy. Her second marriage promised greater felicity.’

Mr. Venables looked at me curiously.

‘I understood,’ he began, but he broke off abruptly. ‘I did not know Madame de Savaresse married again.’

His tone had suddenly changed, it had grown less cordial, and we parted shortly afterwards with a certain constraint. And as I walked home pensively curious, his interrupted sentence puzzled me. Does he look upon me as an impostor, a vulgar gossip-monger? What has he heard, what does he know of her? Does he know anything? I cannot help believing so. I almost wish I had asked him definitely, but he would have misunderstood my motives. Yet, even so, I wish I had asked him.