had meant to do; he was annoyed at having meant to do it; the bottom, suddenly, had fallen out of his revenge.  Whether it was Christian charity or unregenerate good nature—­what it was, in the background of his soul—­I don’t pretend to say; but Newman’s last thought was that of course he would let the Bellegardes go.  If he had spoken it aloud he would have said that he didn’t want to hurt them.  He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them.  They had hurt him, but such things were really not his game.  At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who had won a victory or taken a resolve, but strolling soberly, like a good-natured man who is still a little ashamed.

Going home, he said to Mrs. Bread that he must trouble her to put back his things into the portmanteau she had unpacked the evening before.  His gentle stewardess looked at him through eyes a trifle bedimmed.  “Dear me, sir,” she exclaimed, “I thought you said that you were going to stay forever.”

“I meant that I was going to stay away forever,” said Newman kindly.  And since his departure from Paris on the following day he has certainly not returned.  The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of stand ready to receive him; but they serve only as a spacious residence for Mrs. Bread, who wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the tassels of the curtains, and keeps her wages, which are regularly brought her by a banker’s clerk, in a great pink Sevres vase on the drawing-room mantel-shelf.

Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram’s and found Tom Tristram by the domestic fireside.  “I’m glad to see you back in Paris,” this gentleman declared.  “You know it’s really the only place for a white man to live.”  Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome, according to his own rosy light, and offered him a convenient resume of the Franco-American gossip of the last six months.  Then at last he got up and said he would go for half an hour to the club.  “I suppose a man who has been for six months in California wants a little intellectual conversation.  I’ll let my wife have a go at you.”

Newman shook hands heartily with his host, but did not ask him to remain; and then he relapsed into his place on the sofa, opposite to Mrs. Tristram.  She presently asked him what he had done after leaving her.  “Nothing particular,” said Newman.

“You struck me,” she rejoined, “as a man with a plot in his head.  You looked as if you were bent on some sinister errand, and after you had left me I wondered whether I ought to have let you go.”

“I only went over to the other side of the river—­to the Carmelites,” said Newman.

Mrs. Tristram looked at him a moment and smiled.  “What did you do there?  Try to scale the wall?”

“I did nothing.  I looked at the place for a few minutes and then came away.”

Mrs. Tristram gave him a sympathetic glance.  “You didn’t happen to meet M. de Bellegarde,” she asked, “staring hopelessly at the convent wall as well?  I am told he takes his sister’s conduct very hard.”