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 XXIII

was opened by the little waiting-maid whom he had seen at Blanquais, and who looked at him very hard before she answered his inquiry.

"You see I have found Mrs. Vivian's dwelling, though you wouldn't give me the address," Bernard said to her, smiling.

"Monsieur has put some time to it!" the young woman answered drily. And she informed him that Madame was at home, though Mademoiselle, for whom he had not asked, was not.

Mrs. Vivian occupied a diminutive apartment at the summit of one of the tall white houses which ornament the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. The early days of September had arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honourable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian's little high-nestling drawing-room, and the dying sunshine, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded wall. Bernard had seen these ladies only in borrowed and provisional abodes; but here was a place where they were really living, and which was stamped with 181