“Thank you,” he answered, rising to go.  “Yes, it is a thing one may as well know.  It is very kind of them, these people, to take such trouble, to be sufficiently interested.  Upon my honour, I do not know that I very much care.  After all, what does it matter?”

“Nothing to me,” said Lady Garnett, with a little shrug of disdain—­“nothing, Dieu me pardonne! even if it were true.”

“Well, good-bye,” he said.

As he held her hand for a moment between his own he thought it trembled slightly.

“Ah, no!” she said quickly; “it is a phrase I decline.  Come and see me soon.  I am an old woman, my friend, and I have outlived my generation.  I have said too many good-byes in my time.  It is au revoir.”

“With all my heart,” he said, smiling. “Au revoir.”

Her quaint intimation—­that was the manner in which he characterized it—­was already dismissed from his mind when he emerged into the street.

He had too many graver preoccupations to be greatly troubled by this grotesque slander.  Going on his way, however—­a temporary cessation of the soft, persistent rain which had been falling for most of the day suggested a walk—­a chance recollection brought him to a sudden stop, changing his indifference for a moment into the shadow of pale indignation.  How dull of him not to have guessed at once! it must be that unfortunate girl, Kitty Crichton, with whom busybodies were associating his name.  He wondered how they had discovered her, and by whom the stupid story had been set afloat.  The baselessness of the scandal, conjoined with his immense apathy just then as to anything more that the malice of men could do, inclined him to amusement, the more so as he reflected how many months it was since the girl and her wretched history had passed from his ken.  He had found her gone on his return from Italy in the spring, leaving no address and but the briefest acknowledgment of his good-will in a note, which stated that she had no longer any excuse for imposing on his kindness—­had found friends.  The letter closed, as he imagined, a painful history, which, since his service had been, after all, so fruitless, he could see ended with relief.  To his interpretation, the girl had recovered her scoundrel journalist, or at least compelled him to contribute to her support; and after all, as it seemed, he had not done with her yet, though the fashion of her return was ghostly and immaterial enough.  The subject galled him; there were always dim possibilities lurking in the background of it which he refused to contemplate; he dismissed it.  His meditation had carried him through the bustle of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch, and, the weather still encouraging him, he decided to turn into the Park.  Many rainy days had made the air exceedingly soft, and in his enjoyment of this unusual quality, and of the strangely sweet odour of the wet earth and mildewing leaves, he forgot for a while a certain momentous sentence