With volubility and dispatch the owner of the hat expressed her opinion of his awkwardness; one or two people near them laughed, and, flushing a desperate red, he turned, raised his hat, and offered an apology.

The possessor of the feathers was a woman of thirty who looked ten years older than her age; her face was unhealthily pale even beneath its mask of powder, and her eyes were curiously lifeless, but her clothes were costly and her figure fine, if a trifle robust.  At sound of the boy’s voice she turned.  Her movement was slow and deliberate; her gaze, in which a dull resentment smouldered, passed over his confused, flushed face, and rested upon Blake’s; then a light, if light it might be called, glimmered in her eyes, and her immobile face relaxed into a smile.

“’Allo, mon cher!  But I thought you had dropped out of life!”

The boy, with a startled movement, turned his eyes on Blake; but Blake was smiling at the woman with the same pleasant smile—­half humorous, half satirical—­that he had bestowed dispassionately upon the young Englishman in the train the night before, and upon the little cafe proprietress of the rue Fabert—­the smile that all his life had been a passport to the world’s byways.

“What! you, Lize!” he was saying easily, and with only the faintest shadow of surprise.  “Well, if I have been dead, I am now resurrected!  Let’s toast old times, since you are alone. Garcon!  Garcon!”

Out of the crowd a waiter answered his call.  Wine was brought, three glasses were brought and filled, while Max watched the performance—­watched the ease and naturalness of it with absorbed wonder.

“Lize,” said Blake, as the waiter disappeared, “my friend who dared to interfere with that marvellous hat is called Max.  Won’t you smile upon him?”

Max blushed again, he could not have told why, and the lady smiled—­a vague, detached smile.

“A pretty boy!” she said.  “He ought to have been a woman.”  Then, sensible of having discharged her duty, she turned again to Blake.

“And the world, mon cher?  It has been kind to you?”

Blake laughed and drank some of his wine.  “Oh, I can’t complain!  If it isn’t quite the same world that it was, the fault’s in me.  I’m getting old, Lize!  Eight-and-thirty come next March!”

A palpable chill touched the woman; she shivered, then laughed a little hysterically, and finished her wine.

“Ssh!  Ssh!  Don’t say such things!”

Blake refilled her glass.  “I was jesting.  A man is as old as he feels; a woman—­” He lifted his own glass and smiled into her eyes with a certain kindliness of understanding.  “Come, Lize!  The old times aren’t so far behind us!  ’Twas only yesterday that Jacques Aujet painted you as the Bacchante in his ‘Masque of Folly.’  Do you remember how angry you were when he used to kiss you, and the grape juice used to run into your hair and down your neck?  Why, ’twas hardly yesterday!”