Not for a very long time, but yet, at last, and all alone, among the readers on the chairs, deep in a Tauchnitz volume even here as in the Alps; more daintily yet not less simply dressed, in pink muslin and a big black hat; and blessed here as there with such blooming health, such inimitable freshness, such a general air of well-being and of deep content, as almost to disgust me after my whole week’s search and my own hourly qualms.

So I found Mrs. Lascelles in the end, and so I saw her until she looked up and saw me; then the picture changed; but I am not going to describe the change.

“Well, really!” she cried out.

“It has taken me all the week to find you,” said I, as I replaced my hat.

Her eyes flashed again.

“Has it, indeed!  And now you have found me, aren’t you satisfied?  Pray have a good look, Captain Clephane.  You won’t find anybody else!”

Her meaning dawned on me at last.

“I didn’t expect to, Mrs. Lascelles.”

“Am I to believe that?”

“You must do as you please.  It is the truth.  Mrs. Lascelles, I have been all the week looking for you and you alone.”

I spoke with some warmth, for not only did I speak the truth, but it had become more and more the truth at every stage of my journey since Brigues.  Mrs. Lascelles leant back in her chair and surveyed me with less anger, but with the purer and more pernicious scorn.

“And what business had you to do that?” she asked calmly.  “How dare you, I should like to know?”

“I dared,” said I, “because I owed you a debt which, I felt, must be paid in person, or it would never be paid at all.  Mrs. Lascelles, I owed and do owe you about the most abject apology man ever made!  I have followed you all this way for no other earthly reason than to make it, in all sincere humility.  But it has taken me more or less since Tuesday morning; and I can’t kneel here.  Do you mind if I sit down?”

Mrs. Lascelles drew in the hem of her pink muslin, with an all but insufferable gesture of unwilling resignation.  I took the next chair but one, but, leaning my elbow on the chair-back between us, was rather the gainer by the intervening inches, which enabled me to study a perfect profile and the most wonderful colouring as I could scarcely have done at still closer range.  She never turned to look at me, but simply listened while the band played, and people passed, and I said my say.  It was very short:  there was so little that she did not know.  There was the excitement about Bob, his subsequent reappearance, our scene in his room and my last sight of him in the morning; but the bare facts went into few words, and there was no demand for details.  Mrs. Lascelles seemed to have lost all interest in her latest lover; but when I tried to speak of my own hateful hand in that affair, to explain what I could of it, but to extenuate nothing, and to apologise from my heart for it all, then there was a change in her, then her blood mounted, then her bosom heaved, and I was silenced by a single flash from her eyes.