People would have turned round after her if those dartings out to the halfpast six mass hadn't been the only occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets. She was frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn't fly back to her mountains because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of purpose, predatory instincts. . . .

No, we didn't remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand. She was prayerful. She was terrible. Her oneidead peasant Page 16

mind was as inaccessible as a closed iron safe. She was fatal. . . . It's perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don't mind appearing ridiculous. I suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious or more frightful figures?

We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt's halfhidden acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allegre and the girl Rita. Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story, passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he called, the characteristic Allegre impudence which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degreesthe revelation of Rita's existence to the world at large.

It wasn't a very large world, but then it was most choicely composed. How is one to describe it shortly? In a sentence it was the world that rides in the morning in the Bois.

The Arrow of Gold

II

14

In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took her out with him for their first morning ride.

`Ì leave you to judge of the sensation,'' continued Mr. Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth. `Ànd the consternation,'' he added venomously.

``Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their womenkind with them. But their hats had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort of obligation to Allegre. You would be astonished to hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to mince matters, owed money to Allegre. And I don't mean in the world of art only.