“I’m sure it’s very kind of you, and so disinterested!” simpered the lady as they walked along.  “It’s so pleasant to meet someone who has soul—­someone to sympathize with in a community so hardened and heartless as this.”  And Mrs. Tretherick cast down her eyes, but not until they wrought their perfect and accepted work upon her companion.

“Yes, certainly, of course,” said the colonel, glancing nervously up and down the street—­“yes, certainly.”  Perceiving, however, that there was no one in sight or hearing, he proceeded at once to inform Mrs. Tretherick that the great trouble of his life, in fact, had been the possession of too much soul.  That many women—­as a gentleman she would excuse him, of course, from mentioning names—­but many beautiful women had often sought his society, but being deficient, madam, absolutely deficient, in this quality, he could not reciprocate.  But when two natures thoroughly in sympathy, despising alike the sordid trammels of a low and vulgar community and the conventional restraints of a hypocritical society—­when two souls in perfect accord met and mingled in poetical union, then—­but here the colonel’s speech, which had been remarkable for a certain whisky-and-watery fluency, grew husky, almost inaudible, and decidedly incoherent.  Possibly Mrs. Tretherick may have heard something like it before, and was enabled to fill the hiatus.  Nevertheless, the cheek that was on the side of the colonel was quite virginal and bashfully conscious until they reached their destination.

It was a pretty little cottage, quite fresh and warm with paint, very pleasantly relieved against a platoon of pines, some of whose foremost files had been displaced to give freedom to the fenced enclosure in which it sat.  In the vivid sunlight and perfect silence, it had a new, uninhabited look, as if the carpenters and painters had just left it.  At the farther end of the lot, a Chinaman was stolidly digging; but there was no other sign of occupancy.  “The coast,” as the colonel had said, was indeed “clear.”  Mrs. Tretherick paused at the gate.  The colonel would have entered with her, but was stopped by a gesture.  “Come for me in a couple of hours, and I shall have everything packed,” she said, as she smiled, and extended her hand.  The colonel seized and pressed it with great fervor.  Perhaps the pressure was slightly returned; for the gallant colonel was impelled to inflate his chest, and trip away as smartly as his stubby-toed, high-heeled boots would permit.  When he had gone, Mrs. Tretherick opened the door, listened a moment in the deserted hall, and then ran quickly upstairs to what had been her bedroom.