To all of which Mueller (with a sly grimace expressive of contrition) replied only by a profound salutation and a rapid retreat.  Passing M. Lenoir without so much as a glance, he paused a moment before Mdlle.  Marie who was standing near the door, and said in a tone audible only to her and myself:—­

“I congratulate you, Mademoiselle, on your admirable talent for intrigue.  I trust, when you look in the usual place and find the promised letter, it will prove agreeable reading.  J’ai l’honneur, Mademoiselle, de vous saluer.”

I saw the girl flush crimson, then turn deadly white, and draw back as if his hand had struck her a sudden blow.  The next moment we were half-way down the stairs.

“What, in Heaven’s name, does all this mean?” I said, when we were once more in the street.

“It means,” replied Mueller fiercely, “that the man’s a scoundrel, and the woman, like all other women, is false.”

“Then the whisper you overheard” ...

“Was only this:—­’Look in the usual place, and you will find a letter.’  Not many words, mon cher, but confoundedly comprehensive!  And I who believed that girl to be an angel of candor!  I who was within an ace of falling seriously in love with her! Sacredie! what an idiot I have been!”

“Forget her, my dear fellow,” said I.  “Wipe her out of your memory (which I think will not be difficult), and leave her to her fate.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said, gloomily, “I won’t do that.  I’ll get to the bottom of that man’s mystery; and if, as I suspect, there’s that about his past life which won’t bear the light of day—­I’ll save her, if I can.”

CHAPTER XXXV.

WEARY AND FAR DISTANT.

Twice already, in accordance with my promise to Dalrymple, I had called upon Madame de Courcelles, and finding her out each time, had left my card, and gone away disappointed.  From Dalrymple himself, although I had written to him several times, I heard seldom, and always briefly.  His first notes were dated from Berlin, and those succeeding them from Vienna.  He seemed restless, bitter, dissatisfied with himself, and with the world.  Naturally unfit for a lounging, idle life, his active nature, now that it had to bear up against the irritation of hope deferred, chafed and fretted for work.

“My sword-arm,” he wrote in one of his letters, “is weary of its holiday.  There are times when I long for the smell of gunpowder, and the thunder of battle.  I am sick to death of churches and picture-galleries, operas, dilettantism, white-kid-glovism, and all the hollow shows and seemings of society.  Sometimes I regret having left the army—­at others I rejoice; for, after all, in these piping times of peace, to be a soldier is to be a mere painted puppet—­a thing of pipe-clay and gold bullion—­an expensive scarecrow—­an elegant Guy Fawkes—­a sign, not of what