* * * * *

But one Sunday, as she was going for a walk in the Champs Elysees to refresh herself after the labors of the week, all at once she saw a woman walking with a child.  It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming.

Madame Loisel was agitated.  Should she speak to her?  Why, of course.  And now that she had paid, she would tell her all.  Why not?

She drew near.

“Good morning, Jeanne.”

The other, astonished to be addressed so familiarly by this woman of the people, did not recognize her.  She stammered: 

“But—­madame—­I do not know you.  You must have made a mistake.”

“No, I am Mathilde Loisel.”

Her friend uttered a cry.

“Oh! my poor Mathilde, how changed you are!”

“Yes, I have had days hard enough since I saw you, days wretched enough—­and all because of you!”

“Me?  How so?”

“You remember that necklace of diamonds that you lent me to wear to the ministerial ball?”

“Yes.  Well?”

“Well, I lost it.”

“How can that be?  You returned it to me.”

“I returned to you another exactly like it.  These ten years we’ve been paying for it.  You know it was not easy for us, who had nothing.  At last it is over, and I am very glad.”

Madame Forestier was stunned.

“You say that you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?”

“Yes; you did not notice it, then?  They were just alike.”

And she smiled with a proud and naive pleasure.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took both her hands.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde!  Why, my necklace was paste.  It was worth five hundred francs at most.”

XI.  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING[*] (1888)

[* From “The Phantom ’Rickshaw.”]

BY RUDYARD KIPLING (1865- )

[Setting.  “They call it Kafiristan,” said Dravot, the unfortunate hero of the story.  “By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar.”  Determined to be Kings of Kafiristan, Carnehan and Dravot started probably from the capital of the Punjab, Lahore, where the newspaper office seems to have been.  Ten miles west of Peshawar they entered the famous Khaiber (or Khyber) Pass, a region which Kipling describes more at length in “The Man Who Was,” “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” “The Lost Legion,” “Love o’ Women,” “Wee Willie Winkie,” and “With the Main Guard.”  No country in Asia is less known to civilization than Kafiristan.  The Mohammedan traders say that it is the most attractive part of Afghanistan.  The name means “country of unbelievers,” the Kafirs having resisted all attempts to convert them to the Mohammedan faith.  They are pure Aryans, being thus brothers to the Greeks, Romans, Germans, English, and ourselves.  They are noted for their beauty and strength.  India or rather Anglo-India has been almost re-discovered by Kipling, but this is his only story of Kafiristan.  It too, as Carnehan and Dravot learn to their sorrow, is a land of impenetrable mystery.