I had blushed with pleasure; such fine ideas had never entered my head.  But there was something fine. . . .  How far all this seemed!  How mute and how still!  What a phantom he was, that man with a beard of at least seven tones of brown.  And those shades of the other kind such as Baptiste with the shaven diplomatic face, the maitre d’hotel in charge of the petit salon, taking my hat and stick from me with a deferential remark:  “Monsieur is not very often seen nowadays.”  And those other well-groomed heads raised and nodding at my passage—­“Bonjour.”  “Bonjour”—­following me with interested eyes; these young X.s and Z.s, low-toned, markedly discreet, lounging up to my table on their way out with murmurs:  “Are you well?”—­“Will one see you anywhere this evening?”—­not from curiosity, God forbid, but just from friendliness; and passing on almost without waiting for an answer.  What had I to do with them, this elegant dust, these moulds of provincial fashion?

I also often lunched with Dona Rita without invitation.  But that was now unthinkable.  What had I to do with a woman who allowed somebody else to make her cry and then with an amazing lack of good feeling did her offensive weeping on my shoulder?  Obviously I could have nothing to do with her.  My five minutes’ meditation in the middle of the bedroom came to an end without even a sigh.  The dead don’t sigh, and for all practical purposes I was that, except for the final consummation, the growing cold, the rigor mortis—­ that blessed state!  With measured steps I crossed the landing to my sitting-room.

CHAPTER II

The windows of that room gave out on the street of the Consuls which as usual was silent.  And the house itself below me and above me was soundless, perfectly still.  In general the house was quiet, dumbly quiet, without resonances of any sort, something like what one would imagine the interior of a convent would be.  I suppose it was very solidly built.  Yet that morning I missed in the stillness that feeling of security and peace which ought to have been associated with it.  It is, I believe, generally admitted that the dead are glad to be at rest.  But I wasn’t at rest.  What was wrong with that silence?  There was something incongruous in that peace.  What was it that had got into that stillness?  Suddenly I remembered:  the mother of Captain Blunt.

Why had she come all the way from Paris?  And why should I bother my head about it?  H’m—­the Blunt atmosphere, the reinforced Blunt vibration stealing through the walls, through the thick walls and the almost more solid stillness.  Nothing to me, of course—­the movements of Mme. Blunt, mere.  It was maternal affection which had brought her south by either the evening or morning Rapide, to take anxious stock of the ravages of that insomnia.  Very good thing, insomnia, for a cavalry officer perpetually on outpost duty, a real godsend, so to speak; but on leave a truly devilish condition to be in.