Mlle. Claire was a good girl. She had a mother and two little brothers to keep: so she stuck to the business; but she never liked it very much after that day. Mr. Tappenham could afford to retire, and he did retire. He lives very quietly, and gives large sums in charity. Mlle. Claire knows all the tricks that ever were invented; she is a thorough-going little skeptic, and believes in nothing that she does not see, and in very little of what she does. Therefore she merely exemplifies feminine illogicality when she thinks to herself, as she cannot help thinking now and then:
“I wonder what he did to Nellie Davies!”
She told me about it, and I believed her when she said that she was not playing a trick on Mr. Tappenham. But perhaps she was deceiving me also; if so, that is an explanation.
I repeated the story to a scientific man. He said that it furnished an interesting instance of the permanence of an optical impression after the removal of the external excitant. That is another explanation.
Or it may have been the working of conscience: that is an explanation in a way, though an improbable one, because, in spite of many opportunities, Mr. Tappenham’s conscience had never given him any inconvenience before. It has since.
THE END.
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