“Nor am I going to inflict upon you,” continued Marshfield, after draining his glass, “a full account of my impressions when I found myself once more in that immense, deserted, and stricken house, so luxuriously prepared for the mistress who had fled from it; how I philosophized over all this, according to my wont; the conjectures I made as to the first acts of the drama; the untold sufferings my countrywoman must have endured from the moment her husband first grew jealous till she determined on this desperate step; as to how and when she had met her lover, how they communicated, and how the baron had discovered the intended flitting in time to concoct his characteristic revenge.

“One thing you may be sure of, I had no mind to remain at Yany an hour longer than necessary.  I even contrived to get well clear of the neighborhood before the lady’s absence was discovered.  Luckily for me—­or I might have been taxed with connivance, though indeed the simple household did not seem to know what suspicion was, and accepted my account with childlike credence—­very typical, and very convenient to me at the same time.”

“But how do you know,” said one of us, “that the man was her lover?  He might have been her brother or some other relative.”

“That,” said Marshfield, with his little flat laugh, “I happen to have ascertained—­and, curiously enough, only a few weeks ago.  It was at the play, between the acts, from my comfortable seat (the first row in the pit).  I was looking leisurely round the house when I caught sight of a woman, in a box close by, whose head was turned from me, and who presented the somewhat unusual spectacle of a young neck and shoulders of the most exquisite contour—­and perfectly gray hair; and not dull gray, but rather of a pleasing tint like frosted silver.  This aroused my curiosity.  I brought my glasses to a focus on her and waited patiently till she turned round.  Then I recognized the Baroness Kassowski, and I no longer wondered at the young hair being white.

“Yet she looked placid and happy; strangely so, it seemed to me, under the sudden reviving in my memory of such scenes as I have now described.  But presently I understood further:  beside her, in close attendance, was the man of the sledge, a handsome fellow with much of a military air about him.

“During the course of the evening, as I watched, I saw a friend of mine come into the box, and at the end I slipped out into the passage to catch him as he came out.

“‘Who is the woman with the white hair?’ I asked.  Then, in the fragmentary style approved of by ultra-fashionable young men—­this earnest-languid mode of speech presents curious similarities in all languages—­he told me:  ’Most charming couple in London—­awfully pretty, wasn’t she?—­he had been in the Guards—­attache at Vienna once—­they adored each other.  White hair, devilish queer, wasn’t it?  Suited her, somehow.  And then she had been married to a Russian, or something, somewhere in the wilds, and their names were—­’ But do you know,” said Marshfield, interrupting himself, “I think I had better let you find that out for yourselves, if you care.”