On our way home, we stopped at the shop of Mrs. Hill to add to our supply of eggs, Phillida's hens having unaccountably failed to supply their quota. I went in, leaving my companion in the car.
No one else was in the shop. An impulse prompted me to put a question to the little woman whose life had been spent in this neighborhood.
"Mrs. Hill, did you ever hear of anyone named Desire Michell?" I asked.
She stopped counting eggs and blinked up at me. Her sallow, wrinkled face lightened with curiosity and an absurd primness.
"Now, Mr. Locke! I'd like to know where a young city feller like you got that old story from?"
"I have not got it. I want you to tell it to me. She was a witch?"
"She was a hussy," said Mrs. Hill severely. "I was a little girl when she ran away from her father's respectable house, fifty-odd years ago. The disgrace killed him, being a clergyman. An' the gossip that came back, later, an' pictures of her in such dresses! Dear! Dear! The wicked certainly have opportunities."
"Fifty years ago!" I echoed, dazed by this intrusion of a third Desire Michell.
"Ah! Nearly seventy she'd be if she was alive today; which she ain't. Why, she changed her name to one fancier that you might have heard talk of? She was——"
The name she gave me I shall not set down. It is enough to say it was that of a super-woman whose beauty, genius and absolute lack of conscience set Europe ablaze for a while. A torch of womanhood, quenched at the highest-burning hour of her career by a sudden and violent death.