"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.
"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat beside her. They—the woman and her probable lover, who never once had been suspected, and never since been heard of—drove as far as Persan- Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared, and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the roses, she never has written one since."
"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"
"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor. He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself, 'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the remaining horse."
"It was then he grew cool about women!"
"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'
"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
What shall I do?'
'Why shouldn't you marry her?' I said.
And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much. You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'
"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and then to England."