Hugh got up with a shudder.  “Hush!” he said, sharply.  “It’s too ghastly.  Don’t tell me any more about it.”  He wandered across the room, pulling a leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out.  The wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like inarticulate shouts.  There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were pert crocus-buds in the window-boxes.  The place was full of foolhardy little dare-devils who trusted their fate and might never find it out.  After all, that was the way to live—­as long as one was allowed.  He turned suddenly with his whimsical smile.  “I look out o’ window quite a bit,” he explained, “well, because of my aunt Maria.”  When he sat down again in the Sheraton chair Mrs. Shirley shifted her story to the plane of the smile.

“I don’t know how late it was when Madame Normand popped her head out of the balcony door.”

“‘Who was then surprised?  It was the lady,’ as dear old Brantome says?”

“It was everybody.  The company had gone and Melanie the bonne was putting out the candles.

“’Miss Stewart and I have just discovered that we are very nearly related,’ said he.

“‘But how delightful,’ said Madame, thoroughly annoyed.”

“And the other time,” Hugh hinted.  What he wanted to say was, “So you prevented it, you kept him here, God bless you!” His natural resilience had asserted itself.  Vistas were opening.  The Hugh who accepted life for what it was worth was again in the ascendant, but he found a second to call up the other Hugh, whose legal residence was somewhere near the threshold of consciousness, to take notice.  He had always known that there must have been something in Uncle Hugh’s girl.

“That was a few days later, the afternoon before I left Paris.  I went quite suddenly.  Somebody was sick at home, and I had the chance to travel with some friends who were going.  He had sent me flowers—­no, not roses.”

“Narcissus?”

“Yes.  Old Monsieur Normand was scandalized; it seems one doesn’t send yellow flowers to a jeune fille.  To me it was the most incredibly thoughtful and original thing.  All the other girls had gone with Madame to a very special piano recital, in spite of a drizzling rain.  It had turned cool, too, I remember, because there was a wood fire in the little sitting-room—­not the salon, but the girls’ room.  Being an American, Madame was almost lavish about fires.  And it was a most un-French room, the most careless little place, where the second-best piano lived, and the lilacs, when they were taken in out of the cold.  There were sweet old curtains, and a long sofa in front of the fireplace instead of the traditional armchairs.  Anybody’s books and bibelots lay about.  I was playing.”

“What?” This was important.

“What would a girl play, over twenty years ago, in Paris?  In the crepuscule, with the lilacs that embaument, as they say there, and with a sort of panic in her mind?  Because, after all, the man to whom one is engaged is a man whom one knows very slightly.”