her disappointment in seeing Jill alone strove vainly to mask itself in delight. All the same, as Jill said to herself, half a loaf must be better than no bread; and, after a swift readjustment, the old lady was prepared to make the best of it. Her eye passed with its expression of avid attention over Jill's dress, new to her to-day, and charming in its tones of rosy cedar, its deft mingling of silks and wools.
'You are an incarnation of the springtime, Madame,' she told her. 'One understands your husband's devotion when one looks at you.'
'My husband's devotion!' Jill flushed a little, stared a little, and then laughed. That Graham should have expressed anything of his feeling for her to the old lady she knew to be impossible.
Madame de Lamouderie interpreted her silence as gratification. 'To see such a ménage restores one's faith in human nature,' she went on. 'You are too young, perhaps too innocent of life, to know how rare a thing it is for a wife, however captivating, to retain her husband's fidelity through years of marriage. But when I look at you, the miracle explains itself.'
'But we don't think fidelity a miracle in England,' said Jill, coolly if kindly.—'I wonder if you'd mind my smoking?'
'Mind? Not the least in the world. My daughter also smokes. All fashionable women smoke nowadays, as I am well aware.—So. He has returned to his mountains. I do not blame him. Why should he care to look at an old woman when he can look at moun-
