The story was telegraphed and cabled about the world. As usual, every newspaper published a minutely circumstantial account with a pretendedly verbatim statement of the last words, and, as usual, the accounts were as discrepant mutually as they were commonly remote from the truth.
The idea that the Ambassador's death might be concerned with an intrigue between Mrs. Enslee and Captain Forbes occurred perhaps only to one mind on earth, and that the too-sophisticated brain of a reporter in New York, a brindle-haired man with half of one eyebrow gone. He could not confirm his suspicion even enough for publication, so he hid it in the cellar of his soul, alongside the memory of seeing Persis Cabot walk out of a lonely forest with a man he afterward learned to be Forbes.
When this reporter—Hallard, his name was—was comfortably drunk he would discuss New York society's rotten state of morals, usually with a horrified barkeeper, forgetting his own morals and that of his class and of the other classes low and middle that he knew well enough. He would add: "There's lovely li'l lady growin' a peach of a scan'al—um-m, a pippin!—swee' li'l dynamite bomb. Story's going to break some day, and I'm lovely li'l feller's goin' to break it."
But he would not tell the name. He was holding that in trust for whatever newspaper should be employing his fanatic loyalty at the time of the break. And he was waiting, listening, following.
Persis had been soft-hearted enough to feel the pity of the Ambassador's death. She had wept a little for her stricken enemy, and she suffered some acute stabs of repentance as the instrument of his assassination. But regret was mingled with the lilt of victory and successful evasion—even with blasphemous prayers of gratitude to the Lord for saving her from exposure in the matter. She had fallen on her knees to pour out this thanksgiving, and piously or impiously promised her Lord not to be indiscreet again.
One's god is apt to be one's ideal servant magnified. As the daughters of joy in old Florence used to keep a votive Mary in their rooms and pray to it for success in their offices, so Persis whispered to her heaven words of praise and gratitude for aid in escaping the consequences of her mad whim to nestle in Forbes' arms.
She went to the Ambassador's funeral, partly as a tribute of awesome esteem, partly as good sportsmanship toward a beaten adversary, and chiefly because it would have been conspicuous to stay away when almost every other American in Paris was sure to be there. She compelled Willie to go along, an unwilling and unwitting chaperon.
She saw Forbes in the church, but at a distance, and noted with a gush of pity how haggard and lonely he seemed. She hoped that not all of his grief was for his dead friend. She longed to go to him with comfort, but she ventured only a nod from afar and one of her slow, sweet, tender smiles.