“I have never seen you more resplendent,” he remarked.

She received the tribute with complacency.  “The rooms are not bad, are they?  We came over with the Woolsey Hubbards (you’ve heard of them, of course?—­they’re from Detroit), and really they do things very decently.  Their motor-car met us at Boulogne, and the courier always wires ahead to have the rooms filled with flowers.  This salon, is really a part of their suite.  I simply couldn’t have afforded it myself.”

She delivered these facts in a high decisive voice, which had a note akin to the clink of her many bracelets and the rattle of her ringed hands against the enamelled cigarette-case which she extended to Garnett after helping herself from its contents.

“You are always meeting such charming people,” said Garnett with mild irony; and, reverting to her first remark, he bethought himself to add:  “I hope Miss Hermione is not ill?”

“Ill?  She was never ill in her life,” exclaimed Mrs. Newell, as though her daughter had been accused of an indelicacy.

“It was only that you said you had come over on her account.”

“So I have.  Hermione is to be married.”

Mrs. Newell brought out the words impressively, drawing back to observe their effect on her visitor.  It was such that he received them with a long silent stare, which finally passed into a cry of wonder.  “Married?  For heaven’s sake, to whom?”

Mrs. Newell continued to regard him with a smile so serene and victorious that he saw she took his somewhat unseemly astonishment as a merited tribute to her genius.  Presently she extended a glittering hand and took a sheet of note paper from the blotter.

“You can have that put in to-morrow’s Herald,” she said.

Garnett, receiving the paper, read in Hermione’s own finished hand:  “A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between the Comte Louis du Trayas, son of the Marquis du Trayas de la Baume, and Miss Hermione Newell, daughter of Samuel C. Newell Esqre. of Elmira, N. Y. Comte Louis du Trayas belongs to one of the oldest and most distinguished families in France, and is equally well connected in England, being the nephew of Lord Saint Priscoe and a cousin of the Countess of Morningfield, whom he frequently visits at Adham and Portlow.”

The perusal of this document filled Garnett with such deepening wonder that he could not, for the moment, even do justice to the strangeness of its being written out for publication in the bride’s own hand.  Hermione a bride!  Hermione a future countess!  Hermione on the brink of a marriage which would give her not only a great “situation” in the Parisian world but a footing in some of the best houses in England!  Regardless of its unflattering implications, Garnett prolonged his stare of mute amazement till Mrs. Newell somewhat sharply exclaimed—­“Well, didn’t I always tell you that she would marry a Frenchman?”