Louis turned and looked at me.  For a moment I thought that he was going to accept my offer.  He opened his mouth but said nothing.  He looked away into the darkness once more, and then back into my face.  By this time I knew that he had made up his mind.  He was more like himself again.

“Monsieur Rotherby,” he said, “if I have hesitated at all, it was for your sake.  You are a gentleman of great position.  Afterwards you might feel sorry to think that you had been in such a place, or in such company.”

I patted him on the shoulder reassuringly.

“My dear Louis,” said I, “you need have no such fears about me.  I am a little of an adventurer, a little of a Bohemian.  There is no one else who has a claim upon my life, and I do as I please.  Can’t you tell me a little more about this mysterious cafe?”

“There is so little to tell,” Louis said.  “Of one thing I can assure you,—­you will be disappointed.  There is no music, no dancing.  The interest is only in the people who go there, and their lives.  It may be,” he continued thoughtfully, “that you will not find them much different from all the others.”

“But there is a difference, Louis?” I asked.

“Wait,” he answered.  “You shall see.”

The cab pulled up in front of a very ordinary-looking cafe in a side street leading from one of the boulevards.  Louis dismissed the man and looked for a moment or two up and down the pavement.  His caution appeared to be quite needless, for the thoroughfare was none too well lit, and it was almost empty.  Then he entered the cafe, motioning me to follow him.

“Don’t look around too much,” he whispered.  “There are many people here who do not care to be spied upon.”

My first glance into the place was disappointing.  I was beginning to lose faith in Louis.  After all, it seemed to me that the end of our adventure would be ordinary enough, that I should find myself in one of those places which the touting guides of the Boulevard speak of in bated breath, which one needs to be very young indeed to find interesting even for a moment.  The ground floor of the cafe through which we passed was like a thousand others in different parts of Paris.  The floor was sanded, the people were of the lower orders,—­rough-looking men drinking beer or sipping cordials; women from whom one instinctively looked away, and whose shrill laughter was devoid of a single note of music.  It was all very flat, very uninteresting.  But Louis led the way through a swing door to a staircase, and then, pushing his way through some curtains, along a short passage to another door, against which he softly knocked with his knuckles.  It was opened at once, and a commissionnaire stood gazing stolidly out at us, a commissionnaire in the usual sort of uniform, but one of the most powerful-looking men whom I had ever seen in my life.

“There are no tables, monsieur, in the restaurant,” he said at once.  “There is no place at all.”