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from her with her professional garb, and she smiled as though he must guess the reason.

In ordinary times he would have thought: "She's in love———" but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after René Davril's death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to "the Talketts," picked up now and again at Adele Anthony's, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her "artistic" yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting; and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.

With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat, tossed it on the divan, and said: "Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me." She dropped down beside her hat, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: "Do you know, I've made up my