I looked at the proche parent; not on account of the parentage but marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such tight clothes, too.  But presently the same lady informed me further:  “He has come here amongst us un naufrage.”

I became then really interested.  I had never seen a shipwrecked person before.  All the boyishness in me was aroused.  I considered a shipwreck as an unavoidable event sooner or later in my future.

Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present.  There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women eating fine pastry and talking passionately.  It might have been a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character.  Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that.  And I was by a long way the youngest person in the room.  That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes.  But the temptation was too great—­and I addressed him impulsively on the subject of that shipwreck.

He turned his big fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance, which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness.  On the matter of the shipwreck he did not say much.  He only told me that it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France—­in the Bay of Biscay.  “But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind,” he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.

I expressed my regret.  I should have liked to hear all about it.  To this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps next time we met. . .

“But where can we meet?” I cried.  “I don’t come often to this house, you know.”

“Where?  Why on the Cannebiere to be sure.  Everybody meets everybody else at least once a day on the pavement opposite the Bourse.”

This was absolutely true.  But though I looked for him on each succeeding day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times.  The companions of my idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then) noticed my preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way.  They wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair; whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties:  for they knew I had a footing in both these—­ shall we say circles?  As to themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide—­half a dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short.  My own nick-name was “Young Ulysses.”

I liked it.