to the black-bordered mourning intimations sent out in France, inscribed with the names of every individual member of the family concerned, from the greatest down to the most insignificant and obscure.  “Several pages, I assure you; and everybody came.  The cortege was a mile long.  M. l’Abbe Colaix officiated; there was a full choral mass; and she got her second cousin once removed, M. Aristide Gerant, who, as you know, is Director of the College of Music at A——­, to compose a requiem specially for the occasion; and he did not do it for nothing, you may believe me.  In fine, a first-class funeral.  But, as she said, when some of her near relations, including her stepmother, who is not of the most generous, remonstrated with her on the score of the expense, ’I would wish to honour my dear husband in death as I honoured him in life.’

“After it was all over she had a magnificent marble monument erected over the tomb, recording all his virtues, and with a bas-relief of herself (a very inaccurate representation, I am told, as it gave her a Madonna-like appearance to which she can lay no claim in real life) shedding tears upon his sarcophagus.”

Madame Marcot paused for breath, and, thinking the story finished, we drifted in with appropriate comments.  But we were soon cut short.

“Ten months afterwards,” continued the lady dramatically, “as Madame de Blanchet, dressed of course in the deepest mourning, was making strawberry jam in the kitchen and weeping over her sorrows, who should walk in but Monsieur?”

“What—­her husband?” cried everybody.

“The same,” answered Madame Marcot.  “He was a spectacle.  He had lost an arm; his clothing was in tatters, and he was as thin as a skeleton.  But it was Monsieur de Blanchet all the same.”

“What had happened?” we shrieked in chorus.

“What has happened more than once in the course of this War.  He had been taken prisoner, had been unable to communicate and at last, after many marvellous adventures, had succeeded in escaping.”

“But the other?” we cried.

“Ah, now we come to the really desolating part of the affair,” said Madame Marcot.  “The corpse in M. de Blanchets clothing, what was he but a villainous Boche—­stout, as is the way of these messieurs—­who had appropriated the clothes of the unfortunate prisoner, uniform, badges, disc and all, in order, no doubt, to get into our lines and play the spy.  Happily a shell put an end to his activities; but by the grossest piece of ill-luck it made him completely unrecognisable, so that Madame de Blanchet, as well as the officers who identified him, were naturally led into the mistake of thinking him a good Frenchman, fallen in the exercise of his duty.”

“What happiness to see him back!” I remarked.