The Hohenwalds had evidently departed for a day's outing, as up to five o'clock they had not returned; and Carlton, after loitering all the afternoon, gave up waiting for them, and went out to dine at Laurent's, in the Champs Elysees. He had finished his dinner, and was leaning luxuriously forward, with his elbows on the table, and knocking the cigar ashes into his coffee-cup. He was pleasantly content. The trees hung heavy with leaves over his head, a fountain played and overflowed at his elbow, and the lamps of the fiacres passing and repassing on the Avenue of the Champs Elysees shone like giant fire-flies through the foliage. The touch of the gravel beneath his feet emphasized the free, out-of-door charm of the place, and the faces of the others around him looked more than usually cheerful in the light of the candles flickering under the clouded shades. His mind had gone back to his earlier student days in Paris, when life always looked as it did now in the brief half-hour of satisfaction which followed a cold bath or a good dinner, and he had forgotten himself and his surroundings. It was the voices of the people at the table behind him that brought him back to the present moment. A man was talking; he spoke in English, with an accent.
"I should like to go again through the Luxembourg," he said;
"but you need not be bound by what I do."
"I think it would be pleasanter if we all keep together," said a girl's voice, quietly. She also spoke in English, and with the same accent.
The people whose voices had interrupted him were sitting and standing around a long table, which the waiters had made large enough for their party by placing three of the smaller ones side by side; they had finished their dinner, and the women, who sat with their backs towards Carlton, were pulling on their gloves.
"Which is it to be, then?" said the gentleman, smiling. "The pictures or the dressmakers?"
The girl who had first spoken turned to the one next to her.
"Which would you rather do, Aline?" she asked.
Carlton moved so suddenly that the men behind him looked at him curiously; but he turned, nevertheless, in his chair and faced them, and in order to excuse his doing so beckoned to one of the waiters. He was within two feet of the girl who had been called "Aline." She raised her head to speak, and saw Carlton staring open-eyed at her. She glanced at him for an instant, as if to assure herself that she did not know him, and then, turning to her brother, smiled in the same tolerant, amused way in which she had so often smiled upon Carlton from the picture.
"I am afraid I had rather go to the Bon March," she said.
One of the waiters stepped in between them, and Carlton asked him for his bill; but when it came he left it lying on the plate, and sat staring out into the night between the candles, puffing sharply on his cigar, and recalling to his memory his first sight of the Princess Aline of Hohenwald.
That night, as he turned into bed, he gave a comfortable sigh of content. "I am glad she chose the dressmakers instead of the pictures," he said.
Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris arrived in Paris on Wednesday, and expressed their anxiety to have Carlton lunch with them, and to hear him tell of the progress of his love-affair. There was not much to tell; the Hohenwalds had come and gone from the hotel as freely as any other tourists in Paris, but the very lack of ceremony about their movements was in itself a difficulty. The manner of acquaintance he could make in the court of the Hotel Meurice with one of the men over a cup of coffee or a glass of bock would be as readily discontinued as begun, and for his purpose it would have been much better if the Hohenwalds had been living in state with a visitors' book and a chamberlain.
On Wednesday evening Carlton took the ladies to the opera, where the Hohenwalds occupied a box immediately opposite them.
Carlton pretended to be surprised at this fact, but Mrs. Downs doubted his sincerity.
"I saw Nolan talking to their courier to-day," she said, "and I fancy he asked a few leading questions."
"Well, he didn't learn much if he did," he said. "The fellow only talks German."
"Ah, then he has been asking questions!" said Miss Morris.
"Well, he does it on his own responsibility," said Carlton, "for I told him to have nothing to do with servants. He has too much zeal, has Nolan; I'm afraid of him."
"If you were only half as interested as he is," said Miss Morris, "you would have known her long ago."
"Long ago?" exclaimed Carlton. "I only saw her four days since."
"She is certainly very beautiful," said Miss Morris, looking across the auditorium.
"But she isn't there," said Carlton.
That's the eldest sister; the two other sisters went out on the coach this morning to Versailles, and were too tired to come tonight. At least, so Nolan says. He seems to have established a friendship for their English maid, but whether it's on my account or his own I don't know. I doubt his unselfishness."
"How disappointing of her!" said Miss Morris. And after you had selected a box just across the way, too. It is such a pity to waste it on us." Carlton smiled, and looked up at her impudently, as though he meant to say something; but remembering that she was engaged to be married, changed his mind, and lowered his eyes to his programme.
"Why didn't you say it?" asked Miss Morris, calmly, turning her glass to the stage. "Wasn't it pretty?"
"No," said Carlton--" not pretty enough."
The ladies left the hotel the next day to take the Orient Express, which left Paris at six o'clock. They had bidden Carlton goodbye at four the same afternoon, and as he had come to their rooms for that purpose, they were in consequence a little surprised to see him at the station, running wildly along the platform, followed by Nolan and a porter. He came into their compartment after the train had started, and shook his head sadly at them from the door.
"Well, what do you think of this?" he said. "You can't get rid of me, you see. I'm going with you."
"Going with us?" asked Mrs. Downs. "How far?"
