as if the need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age,

I kept easily awake; and in my freshness I was kept amused by the
contrast of personalities, of the disclosed facts and moral outlook

with the rough initiations of my West-Indian experience. And all
these things were dominated by a feminine figure which to my

imagination had only a floating outline, now invested with the
grace of girlhood, now with the prestige of a woman; and indistinct

in both these characters. For these two men had SEEN her, while to
me she was only being "presented," elusively, in vanishing words,

in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice.
She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the

early hour of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a
light bay "bit of blood" attended on the off side by that Henry

Allegre mounted on a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the
other by one of Allegre's acquaintances (the man had no real

friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion.
And so that side of the frame in which that woman appeared to one

down the perspective of the great Allee was not permanent. That
morning when Mr. Blunt had to escort his mother there for the

gratification of her irresistiblecuriosity (of which he highly
disapproved) there appeared in succession, at that woman's or

girl's bridle-hand, a cavalry general in red breeches, on whom she
was smiling; a rising politician in a grey suit, who talked to her

with great animation but left her side abruptly to join a personage
in a red fez and mounted on a white horse; and then, some time

afterwards, the vexed Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother (though I
really couldn't see where the harm was) had one more chance of a

good stare. The third party that time was the Royal Pretender
(Allegre had been painting his portrait lately), whose hearty,

sonorous laugh was heard long before the mounted trio came riding
very slowly abreast of the Blunts. There was colour in the girl's

face. She was not laughing. Her expression was serious and her
eyes thoughtfullydowncast. Blunt admitted that on that occasion

the charm, brilliance, and force of her personality was adequately
framed between those magnificently mounted, paladin-like

attendants, one older than the other but the two composing together
admirably in the different stages of their manhood. Mr. Blunt had

never before seen Henry Allegre so close. Allegre was riding
nearest to the path on which Blunt was dutifully giving his arm to

his mother (they had got out of their fiacre) and wondering if that
confounded fellow would have the impudence to take off his hat.

But he did not. Perhaps he didn't notice. Allegre was not a man
of wandering glances. There were silver hairs in his beard but he

looked as solid as a statue. Less than three months afterwards he
was gone.

"What was it?" asked Mills, who had not changed his pose for a very
long time.

"Oh, an accident. But he lingered. They were on their way to
Corsica. A yearlypilgrimage. Sentimental perhaps. It was to

Corsica that he carried her off - I mean first of all."
There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt's facial muscles.

Very slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all
simple souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must

have been mental. There was also a suggestion of effort before he
went on: "I suppose you know how he got hold of her?" in a tone of

ease which was astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-
controlled, drawing-room person.

Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment.
Then he leaned back in his chair and with interest - I don't mean

curiosity, I mean interest: "Does anybody know besides the two
parties concerned?" he asked, with something as it were renewed (or

was it refreshed?) in his unmoved quietness. "I ask because one
has never heard any tales. I remember one evening in a restaurant

seeing a man come in with a lady - a beautiful lady - very
particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen out of

Mahomet's paradise. With Dona Rita it can't be anything as
definite as that. But speaking of her in the same strain, I've

always felt that she looked as though Allegre had caught her in the
precincts of some temple . . . in the mountains."

I was delighted. I had never heard before a woman spoken about in
that way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book. For

this was no poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category of
visions. And I would have lost myself in it if Mr. Blunt had not,

most unexpectedly, addressed himself to me.
"I told you that man was as fine as a needle."

And then to Mills: "Out of a temple? We know what that means."
His dark eyes flashed: "And must it be really in the mountains?"

he added.
"Or in a desert," conceded Mills, "if you prefer that. There have

been temples in deserts, you know."
Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.

"As a matter of fact, Henry Allegre caught her very early one
morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small

birds. She was sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old
balustrade, with her feet in the damp grass, and reading a tattered

book of some kind. She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (une
petite robe de deux sous) and there was a hole in one of her

stockings. She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her
thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a

mortal. They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was too
startled to move; and then he murmured, "Restez donc." She lowered

her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on
the path. Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds

filling the air with their noise. She was not frightened. I am
telling you this positively because she has told me the tale

herself. What better authority can you have . . .?" Blunt paused.
"That's true. She's not the sort of person to lie about her own

sensations," murmured Mills above his clasped hands.
"Nothing can escape his penetration," Blunt remarked to me with

that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on
Mills' account. "Positively nothing." He turned to Mills again.

"After some minutes of immobility - she told me - she arose from
her stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition.

Allegre was nowhere to be seen by that time. Under the gateway of
the extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the

garden from the street, the wife of the porter was waiting with her
arms akimbo. At once she cried out to Rita: 'You were caught by

our gentleman.'
"As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita's

aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allegre was
away. But Allegre's goings and comings were sudden and

unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged
street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of

Allegre's return and unseen by the porter's wife.
"The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her

regret of having perhaps got the kind porter's wife into trouble.
"The old woman said with a peculiar smile: 'Your face is not of

the sort that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn't
angry. He says you may come in any morning you like.'

"Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back
again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her

waking hours. Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed
hours, she calls them. She crossed the street with a hole in her

stocking. She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and
aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand

oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and
untidy and totallyconscious" target="_blank" title="a.无意识的；不觉察的">unconscious of her personal appearance. She

told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her
personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of

her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a
Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the

family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had
sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.

She is of peasant stock, you know. This is the true origin of the
'Girl in the Hat' and of the 'Byzantine Empress' which excited my

dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged
personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in