"How sweet of you!" said Theodora.

As they rushed through the smiling country, both women's spirits rose,
and Mrs. McBride's were the spirits of experience and did not mount
without due cause. Since she had been a girl in Dakota and passionately
in love with her first husband--the defunct McBride was a second
venture--she had not met a man who could quicken her pulse like Captain
Fitzgerald. It was a curious coincidence that they both had already two
partners to regret. It was an extra link between them, and Jane
McBride, who was superstitious, read the omen to mean that this time
each had met his true mate.

"If he is irresistible to-day, I think I shall clinch matters," she was
saying to herself.

While Theodora's musings ran: "How beautiful Versailles will look, and I dare say he will know all
about its history, and be able to tell me interesting things; and oh! I
am so glad I put on this frock, and oh! I am so happy."

And aloud they spoke of paradise plumes and the new gray, and the merits
and demerits of Callot and Doucet and Jeanne Valez. And the widow said
some bright American things about husbands and the world in general that
conveyed crisp truths.

The drive seemed all too short, and there were their two cavaliers in
the court-yard awaiting them at the Réservoirs, having arrived just
before them.