haste. The withdrawal of Sabine from the position of wife was executed with as superb an air of indifference as her entrance into the rôle.
"I want no settlement and no allowance," she had said as the three of them sat about the tea table in the small sitting room of the house in the Avenue du Bois. "Whatever you care to do for little Thérèse is, of course, your own affair. She is yours as much as mine. (A lie, she thought, because they did not care for her at all.) I have all I want."
And the leave-taking had been like the departure of a woman from the office of her lawyer. There was no anger and there were no tears. Sabine rose and said, "I will go now. . . . I have taken a house in the Rue Tilsit. I shall be there in case you want me. I do not know the telephone but I will send it to you."
Thérèse bent over the table and, gathering up the papers with her fat glittering fingers, thrust them into the reticule in which she kept her important documents . . . a moldy old bag continually in a state of confusion, from which she was able by a sort of magic to produce on a moment's notice any paper she required. As she sat watching her, it occurred to Sabine that the old woman's Levantine blood had begun to claim her entirely. It was not only the diamonds and emeralds which now stood in need of cleaning; the heavy black clothes which Thérèse wore even in the hottest weather were now sometimes stained and discolored, and she had taken to carrying fragments of biscuits among the papers of her reticule, which she took out from time to time and nibbled with the furtive air of a fat squirrel. She was more near-sighted than ever and squinted up her eyes until they became mere slits through which appeared the glitter of two tiny brilliant lights. All the charm was slipping slowly away from her eccentricity; the queer abrupt manner, which in the height of her power had seemed amusing and original, was slowly turning into the queerness of an untidy old Greek woman.
Watching her, she thought, "God willing, I shall never turn
