“MRS. Falchion,” she interrupted clearly.
“MRS. Falchion!” he said, with surprise. “It is so many years since we had met, and—”
“And it is so easy to forget things? But it isn’t so many, really—only seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal. Dear me, how erudite that sounds!... So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same.”
“The same, yet not the same,” he repeated after her, with an attempt at lightness, yet abstractedly.
“I think you gentlemen know each other?” she said.
“Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning. I was visiting the grave of a young French officer.”
“I know,” she said—“Justine Caron’s brother. She has told me; but she did not tell me your name.”
“She has told you?” he said.
“Yes. She is—my companion.” I saw that she did not use the word that first came to her.
“How strangely things occur! And yet,” he added musingly, “I suppose, after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel, particularly with people whose lives are connected—more or less.”