No, we didn’t remain long enough with Mr. Blunt to see even as much as her back glide out of the house on her prayerful errand.  She was prayerful.  She was terrible.  Her one-idead peasant mind was as inaccessible as a closed iron safe.  She was fatal. . .  It’s perfectly ridiculous to confess that they all seem fatal to me now; but writing to you like this in all sincerity I don’t mind appearing ridiculous.  I suppose fatality must be expressed, embodied, like other forces of this earth; and if so why not in such people as well as in other more glorious or more frightful figures?

We remained, however, long enough to let Mr. Blunt’s half-hidden acrimony develop itself or prey on itself in further talk about the man Allegre and the girl Rita.  Mr. Blunt, still addressing Mills with that story, passed on to what he called the second act, the disclosure, with, what he called, the characteristic Allegre impudence—­which surpassed the impudence of kings, millionaires, or tramps, by many degrees—­the revelation of Rita’s existence to the world at large.  It wasn’t a very large world, but then it was most choicely composed.  How is one to describe it shortly?  In a sentence it was the world that rides in the morning in the Bois.

In something less than a year and a half from the time he found her sitting on a broken fragment of stone work buried in the grass of his wild garden, full of thrushes, starlings, and other innocent creatures of the air, he had given her amongst other accomplishments the art of sitting admirably on a horse, and directly they returned to Paris he took her out with him for their first morning ride.

“I leave you to judge of the sensation,” continued Mr. Blunt, with a faint grimace, as though the words had an acrid taste in his mouth.  “And the consternation,” he added venomously.  “Many of those men on that great morning had some one of their womankind with them.  But their hats had to go off all the same, especially the hats of the fellows who were under some sort of obligation to Allegre.  You would be astonished to hear the names of people, of real personalities in the world, who, not to mince matters, owed money to Allegre.  And I don’t mean in the world of art only.  In the first rout of the surprise some story of an adopted daughter was set abroad hastily, I believe.  You know ‘adopted’ with a peculiar accent on the word—­and it was plausible enough.  I have been told that at that time she looked extremely youthful by his side, I mean extremely youthful in expression, in the eyes, in the smile.  She must have been . . .”

Blunt pulled himself up short, but not so short as not to let the confused murmur of the word “adorable” reach our attentive ears.

The heavy Mills made a slight movement in his chair.  The effect on me was more inward, a strange emotion which left me perfectly still; and for the moment of silence Blunt looked more fatal than ever.