affair is concluded, I promise you to take no steps towards ferreting out all about this young woman."
******
Thus it fell out that Alaric Baring sold his picture for what he asked, five thousand francs, the following day; and that Madame Martineau learnt she was to lose not only the brother and sister who had lodged with her so long, but also the best-paying of her pensionnaires—the girl who had not yet been with her five months. The announcement, as regarded Miss Shaw at least, was received with extravagant expressions of regret by most of the men. Old Madame Clinchaut's sentiments were not of much consequence, either way; and Madame de Belcour's satisfaction at the departure of the insolent young Anglaise who had treated her with such marked coldness, was too thinly coated with conventional phrases not to be apparent to every one. Had not the American's intercourse with Elizabeth been conspicuous in public for its austerity, madame's malevolence would certainly have sown broadcast seeds of suggestion that the brother, and not the sister, was the attraction that drew the English girl away to Mentone. But as, though seated next each other at table, they interchanged so few words—Elizabeth, indeed, spoke more to every one at table than to Mr. Baring—it was manifestly absurd to hint that he was the loadstone. Madame de Belcour and Anatole Doucet agreed that l'Anglaise was a hard, cold creature, with none of the instincts of her sex. This had been manifest by her treatment of him. Probably she belonged to that new strange set of women, touching whom they had heard and read something lately, as being
