“When we have found out that it is a mistake, the police of Paris will apologise to you, Mademoiselle, through me,” said the Commissary; “until then, I regret if our duty makes us disagreeable to you.”  Then, turning to his two gendarmes, he directed them to search the room, beginning with all possible places in which a paper parcel or large envelope might be hidden, within ten metres of the spot where Mademoiselle and Monsieur had stood talking together when the police opened the door.

Maxine did not protest again.  With her head up, and a look as if the three policemen were of no more importance to her than the furniture of the room, she walked to the mantelpiece and stood leaning her elbow upon it.  Weariness, disgusted indifference, were in her attitude; but I guessed that she felt herself actually in need of the physical support.

The two gendarmes moved about in noiseless obedience, their faces expressionless as masks.  They did not glance at Maxine, giving themselves entirely to the task at which they had been set.  But their superior officer did not once take his eyes from the pure profile she turned scornfully towards him.  I knew why he watched her thus, and thought of a foolish, child’s game I used to play twenty years ago, at little-boy-and-girl parties:  the game of “Hide-the-Handkerchief.”  While one searched for the treasure, those who knew where it was stood by, saying:  “Now you are warm.  Now you are hot—­boiling hot.  Now you are cool again.  Now you are ice cold.”  It was as if we were five players at this game, and Maxine de Renzie’s white, deathly smiling face was expected to proclaim against her will:  “Now you are warm.  Now you are hot.  Now you are ice cold.”

There was a table in the middle of the room, with one or two volumes of photographs and brightly-bound guide books of Paris upon it, as well as my hat and gloves which I had tossed down as I came in.  The gendarmes picked up these things, examined them, laid them aside, peered under the table; peeped behind the silk cushions on the sofa, opened the doors and drawers of a bric-a-brac cabinet and a small writing desk, lifted the corners of the rugs on the bare, polished floor; and finally, bowing apologies to Maxine for disturbing her, took out the logs from the fireplace where the fire was ready for lighting, and pried into the vases on the mantel.  Also they shook the silk and lace window curtains, and moved the pictures on the walls.  When all this had been done in vain, the pair confessed with shrugs of the shoulders that they were at a loss.

During the search, which had been conducted in silence, I had a curious sensation, caused by my intense sympathy with Maxine’s suffering.  I felt as if my heart were the pendulum of a clock which had been jarred until it was uncertain whether to go on or stop.  Once, when the gendarmes were peering under the sofa, or behind the sofa cushions, a grey shadow round Maxine’s eyes made her beautiful face look like a death-mask in the white electric light, which did not fail now, or spare her any cruelty of revelation.  She was smiling contemptuously still—­always the same smile—­but her forehead appeared to have been sprinkled with diamond dust.