. .?''

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. `Àfter some minutes of immobilityshe told meshe 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.'

`Às 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 totally 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 thèGirl in the Hat' and of thèByzantine Empress' which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in polities, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allegre's exclusive Pavilion: the Dona Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Dona Rita of the initiated

Paris. Dona Rita and nothing moreunique and indefinable.'' He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

`Ànd of peasant stock?'' I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

`Òh! All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,'' said Captain Blunt moodily.

``You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable _caserios._ As far as that goes she's Dona Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of Page 14

others. In your eyes, for instance, Mills. Eh?''

For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

``Why think about it at all?'' he murmured coldly at last. `À strange bird is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate of such a bird is bound to be illdefined, uncertain, questionable.