“Thank you,” said Mr. Dudley.  “We have done nothing but run to the watch-tower to see if you were coming.  Tell us quickly the ghastly news.  We are prepared for the worst.”

“If you read Turgenieff,” replied Hazard, “you can imagine the kind of experience we have had.  I feel as though I had stolen a chapter from one of his stories.”

“No matter!  Spoil it promptly!  We never read any thing.”

“May I have first a cup of tea, Miss Dudley?  Thank you!  That woman has left a taste on my palate that all the tea in China will never wash off.  Where shall I begin?”

“Where we left off,” said Esther.  “We left Mr. Wharton in the church at eleven o’clock, and the woman marching up and down outside.”

“At noon I found her there, and knew her at once, though it is ten years since I last saw her.  She is a person whom one does not forget.  I asked her what she wanted.  It seemed that Wharton, in his confusion, had told her to come to his studio without saying where it was; and she was waiting for him to come out again.  I gave her the address and sent her away.  Then I went up to Wharton whom I found in a strange state of mind; he seemed dazed and showed no interest in the affair.  He would not talk of his wife at all until I forced him.  At length, after a struggle, as he said that Miss Dudley had told him to go to her uncle, Mr. Murray, I got him into a carriage and we drove to Mr. Murray’s office.  The upshot was that Mr. Murray and I took the matter into our hands and decided to meet the woman ourselves in his company.  At the hour fixed, we went, all three of us, to the studio.

“It needed at least three of us to deal with that one woman.  When I saw her in Paris she was still young and handsome, with superb eyes and a kind of eastern tread.  You could imagine her, when she did not speak, as Semiramis, Medea, Clytemnestra!  Except that when you saw a little more of her, you felt that she was only a heroine of a cheap theater.  Wharton could not have been fascinated by her, if, at that time of his life, he had ever known a refined woman or mixed at all in the world; but she certainly had a gypsy charm, and seemed to carry oceans of Sahara and caravans of camels about with her.  When she was in one of her furies, it was an echo of the whole Greek drama.  This, you must recollect, was ten years ago, and even then she was spoiled by being coarse and melodramatic, but now she is a horror.  She suggests nothing but the penitentiary.  When she saw that there were three of us, she flew into a whirlwind of passion, and screamed French that I was glad to find I could not wholly understand.  Her dialect must come from the worst class of Parisian thieves.  I should have been glad to understand less than I did.  Every now and then she interrupted this Billingsgate, and seemed to think that her dignity required a loftier style, and she poured out on us whole pages of cheap melodrama.  She began by flinging her fur cap and