“And your first husband’s name?” she inquired.  “Will it pain you to tell it?”

“Not at all,” the Countess answered, with a sad smile.  “It was Francis Ravenel.”

The sound of the name itself brought no shock to Katrine.  She seemed to have heard it before it was spoken, but she made no sign.

She knew it was Frank’s father of whom Madame de Nemours spoke, and the tales of him in North Carolina had more than prepared her for wild doings in his student days.  It seemed strange, however, that Frank had never spoken of an early marriage of his father.  But the more she thought of it, the firmer became her belief that he had never known it.

It was not until the gray of the following morning that she comprehended to the full the weighty significance of Madame de Nemours’ early marriage, and saw clearly the significance of Dermott’s stay in Carolina, with the direful resulting that might come to Frank from the Irishman’s investigations there.

“If Frank’s father married in America, with a wife and child living in France—­” But here Katrine stopped in her thinking, putting the idea from her mind as one too horrid to entertain.

The second apparently disconnected event which led by a circuitous route to the death of Madame de Nemours, as well as to the discovery of that missing witness for whom McDermott long had searched, was announced quietly by the Countess herself one morning of the following May.

Looking up from the Paris Herald, she said to Katrine, “I see that Anne Lennox has leased the old Latour Place in the Boulevard Haussmann for an indefinite period.”

The three months following the coming of Mrs. Lennox made no change in their lives whatever.  Katrine was aware that Madame de Nemours and Anne exchanged visits of courtesy, each missing the other, but early in July she went with the Countess and Josef to Brittany and spent the summer in work, the world forgetting and by the world forgot.

And the divine days with Josef by the sea!  His wisdom, his temper, his splendid intolerance, his prophetic imaginings, as he stormed at the imbecility of his kind!

“It’s this damned idea of realism that’s killing art!” he shrieked one day, on the rocks at Concarneau.  “Who wants things natural?  If Jones and Smith could be taught by reiterating life as it is, the race of fools would soon become extinct.  My neighbor loves his neighbor’s wife, and they go off together and there is murder done.  Does the reading of this in book or paper stop my going off with the woman I love if I have the chance?  Not a whit!  Art must raise one’s ideals.  It’s the only thing that helps you, me, any one!”

Or, again, and this was at twilight, waiting under the old crucifix for the herring-boats to come in:  “Anybody with eyesight can imitate the actual.  The real!  What has the creative mind to do with that?  It is not one great and innocent-minded girl you are to represent in Marguerite, it is all girlhood in its innocence and surrender.”