Ste. Marie waved a despondent glove.

“I ’ave,” said he, “w’at you call ze blue.  Papillons noirs—­clouds in my soul.”  It was a species of jest with Ste. Marie—­and he seemed never to tire of it—­to pretend that he spoke English very brokenly.  As a matter of fact, he spoke it quite as well as any Englishman and without the slightest trace of accent.  He had discovered a long time before this—­it may have been while the two were at Eton together—­that it annoyed Hartley very much, particularly when it was done in company and before strangers.  In consequence he became on such occasions a sort of comic-paper caricature of his race, and by dint of much practice, added to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered his best friend.  He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him “my dear “’before other men, whereas at the equivalent “mon cher” the Englishman would doubtless never, as the phrase goes, have batted an eye.

“Ye-es,” he continued, sadly, “I ’ave ze blue.  I weep.  Weez ze tears full ze eyes.  Yes.”  He descended into English.  “I think something’s going to happen to me.  There’s calamity, or something, in the air.  Perhaps I’m going to die.”

“Oh, I know what you are going to do, right enough,” said the other man.  “You’re going to meet the most beautiful woman—­girl—­in the world at dinner, and of course you are going to fall in love with her.”

“Ah, the Miss Benham!” said Ste. Marie, with a faint show of interest.  “I remember now, you said that she was to be there.  I had forgotten.  Yes, I shall be glad to meet her.  One hears so much.  But why am I of course going to fall in love with her?”

“Well, in the first place,” said Hartley, “you always fall in love with all pretty women as a matter of habit, and, in the second place, everybody—­well, I suppose you—­no one could help falling in love with her, I should think.”

“That’s high praise to come from you,” said the other.  And Hartley said, with a short, not very mirthful laugh: 

“Oh, I don’t pretend to be immune.  We all—­everybody who knows her.  You’ll understand presently.”

Ste. Marie turned his head a little and looked curiously at his friend, for he considered that he knew the not very expressive intonations of that young gentleman’s voice rather well, and this was something unusual.  He wondered what had been happening during his six months’ absence from Paris.

“I dare say that’s what I feel in the air, then,” he said, after a little pause.  “It’s not calamity; it’s love.

“Or maybe,” he said, quaintly, “it’s both.  L’un n’empeche pas I’autre.”  And he gave an odd little shiver, as if that something in the air had suddenly blown chill upon him.