So, yet again, poor Eugenie slipped into the snare which Fate had set for one who was only too much a woman.

The Rue des Reservoirs was very empty as Fenwick and Madame de Pastourelles mounted the paved slope leading towards the hotel.  The street-lamps were neither many nor bright—­but from the glazed gallery of the restaurant, a broad, cheerful illumination streamed upon the passers-by.  They stepped within its bounds.  And at the moment, a woman who had just crossed to the opposite side of the street stopped abruptly to look at them.  They paused a few minutes in the entrance, still chatting; the woman opposite made a movement as though to re-cross the street, then shook her head, laughed, and walked away.  Fenwick went into the restaurant and Eugenie hurried through the courtyard to the door of the Findon’s apartment.

But in her reflexions of the night, Eugenie came to the conclusion that the situation, as it then stood at Versailles, was not one to be prolonged.

Next day she proposed to her father and sister a change of plan.  On the whole, she said, she was anxious to get back to London; the holiday was overspreading its due limits; and she urged pressing on and home.  Lord Findon was puzzled, but submissive; the bookish sister Theresa, now a woman of thirty, welcomed anything that would bring her back to the London Library and the British Museum.  But suddenly, just as the maids had been warned, and Lord Findon’s man had been sent to look out trains, his master caught a chill, going obstinately, and in a mocking spirit, to see what ‘Faust’ might be like, as given at the Municipal Theatre of Versailles.  There was fever, and a touch of bronchitis; nothing serious; but the doctor who had been summoned from Paris would not hear of travelling.  Lord Findon hoarsely preached ‘chewing’ to him, through the greater part of his visits; he revenged himself by keeping a tight hold on his patient, in all that was not his tongue.  Eugenie yielded, with what appeared to Theresa a strange amount of reluctance; and they settled down for a week or two.

In the middle of the convalescence, the elder son, Marmaduke, came over to see his father.  He was a talkative Evangelical, like his mother; a partner in the brewery owned by his mother’s kindred; and recently married to a Lady Louisa.

After spending three days at the hotel, he suddenly said to Lord Findon, as he was mounting guard one night, while Eugenie wrote some letters: 

‘I say, pater, do you want Eugenie to marry that fellow Fenwick?’

Lord Findon turned uneasily in his bed.

‘What makes you say that?’

’Well, he’s dreadfully gone on her—­never happy except when she’s there—­and she—­well, she encourages him a good bit, father.’

’You don’t understand, Marmie.  You see, you don’t care for books and pictures; Eugenie does.’

‘I suppose she does,’ said Marmaduke, doubtfully—­’but she wouldn’t care so much if Fenwick wasn’t there to talk about them.’