“Poor Tayleure!” one of the attaches said, at the Cafe Anglais, over his Marennes oysters, after the opera; “doomed to pig-iron, I’m afraid.  Must do it.  Can’t carry on much longer.  Another skein of false hair this season, by Jove.”

In a society so charmingly constituted, the blows are dealt with an impartial hand; and it is so mercifully arranged, that he who is doubling his fist seldom feels the blow that is falling upon his own back.  It was a belief which consoled the poor Baronet’s orphan through her dreary time at the boarding-house—­that, at least, she was free from damaging comment.  Her noble head was many inches out of water; the conviction gave her superb confidence when she had to pass an opinion on her neighbour.

Two old friends of Cosmo Bertram are lounging in the garden of the Imperial Club.

“Hasn’t old Tayleure got her knife into Bertram!  Poor dear boy.  It’s all up with him.  Great pity.  Was a capital fellow.”

“Don’t you know the secret?  The old girl had designs on Bertram when he first turned up; and the Daker affair cast her plot to the winds.  Mrs. Daker, you remember, was at old Tayleure’s place—­Rue d’Angouleme!”

“A pretty business that was.  But who the deuce was Daker?”

“Bad egg.”

The threads of this story lay in a tangle—­in Paris, in Boulogne, and in Kent!  I never laboured hard to unravel them; but time took up the work, and I was patient.  Also, I was far away from its scenes, and only passed through them at intervals—­generally at express speed.  It so happened, however, that I was at hand when the crisis and the close came.

Mrs. Daker was living in a handsome apartment when I called upon her on the morrow of the ball.  She wept passionately when she saw me.  She said—­“I could have sunk to the earth when I saw you with Bertram—­of all men in the world.”  I could get no answers to my questions save that she had heard no tidings of her husband, and that she had never had the courage to write to her father.  Plentiful tears and prayers that I would forget her; and never, under any temptation, let her people, should I come across them, know her assumed name, or her whereabouts.  I pressed as far as I could, but she shut her heart upon me, and hurried me away, imploring me never to return, nor to speak about her to Cosmo Bertram.  “He will never talk about me,” she added, with something like scorn, and something very like disgust.

I left Paris an hour or two after this interview; and when I next met Bertram—­at Baden, I think, in the following autumn—­great as my curiosity was, I respected Mrs. Baker’s wish.  He never touched upon the subject; and, since I could not speak, and my suspicions affected him in a most painful manner, I did not throw myself in his way, nor give him an opportunity of following me up.  Besides, he was in a very noisy, reckless set, and was, I could perceive before I had talked to him ten