To Maple Valley, through the mouth of her sister, she was merely an Iowa girl who had had the good fortune to marry an Italian nobleman with whom she had lived in his villa outside Ravenna until he died, when her position and her desire made it a simple matter for her to claim a social rank of considerable eminence in Paris. This much these folk would know about her, and little besides. Her friends would be middle-aged. Some of them would have married and have left Maple Valley. There would be the nucleus of a new group, a new generation, and she felt that she could safely entrust her broken heart to this new group, against the security of the familiar background—a background so familiar that on certain dull, rainy days, sitting in her rose salon on the Avenue Gabriel, she had sometimes diverted herself by reconstructing it, from the unpaved streets to the station—with some difficulty she recalled the American word depot—before which the trains stopped.
At any rate, she had determined on this step as the only feasible move that remained for her to make, and she had made it. 'This time, after she had instructed Marie to pack her trunks, the order had not been countermanded. This time, after cabling her sister, she had boarded the train for Havre, and embarked on the steamship for New York. And, to make the distinction between her present and the past she hoped to recreate as complete as possible, she had left Marie in Paris, travel-
