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 story with an Oriental sense of color, and slowly before the eyes of the girl she recreated the color of Constantinople in her youth, all the magic of the summer palace and the Bosphorus by moonlight, all the desolation of the Greek aunts, all the crafty manner of the rich old Dikran Leopopulos, and above all the somber glow of the love she had known for the blond and handsome young American. Under the spell of her own tale she began to speak half in French, half in English, but Ellen, listening, became so caught up in the magic of the story that she understood it all, even those things which Thérèse Callendar related in an alien tongue. The tale set fire to a vein of warmth in the girl which until now had gone undiscovered, save only at times when, lost in her music, it had emerged translated into a beauty of sound. For the moment even the plump Greek woman herself appeared no longer to be old and ugly and covered with diamonds in need of cleaning. In the fervor of her story, she attained for a passing instant the quality of youth and of a fleeting beauty out of the Levant.

And when she had finished, she leaned back and said, with a wicked chuckle, "Voyez. I am ugly now and fat. But I was not then." Then she sighed quickly and looked down at her rings. "You see the thing is that he died . . . he was drowned before we had been married two years."

Again Ellen kept silent. There was nothing for her to say that would not have been trivial and idiotic. She waited and presently Thérèse said, "You see, I can understand. . . . I wanted you to know that. . . . One would have said that he and I were separated by a thousand things. None of them made the least difference."

It was Ellen who in the end interrupted the strange, breathless silence which enveloped them at the conclusion of Thérèse's story. She murmured, "It was nothing that I meant to do. . . . It happened. . . . I don't know how. . . . It happened without either of us saying anything. It was," (she groped for the words