The woman looked down, and for a moment a shadow seemed to rest upon her—­a something tangible and even fearful, that lent to her mask-like face a momentary humanity.

“Mon ami,” she said, in a toneless voice, “do you remember that Jacques is ten years dead?”

Then suddenly, as if fleeing from her own fear, she looked up again, surfeiting her senses with the crowds, the lights, the smoke and scent and crashing music.

“But what folly!” she cried.  “Life goes on!  The same round, is it not so?  Life and love and jealousy!  Come, little monsieur, what have you to say?”

She turned to Max, sitting silent and attentive; but even as she turned, there was a flutter of interest among the tables behind her, and a young girl ran up, laying her hand upon her arm.

“Lize!” she said, with a little gasp.  “Lize!  He is here—­and I am afraid.”

Max looked up.  It was the girl he had pointed out to Blake as sitting at the table with the ugly, clever-looking man; and his eyes opened wide in fresh surprise, fresh interest as he studied the details of her appearance.  She was of that most attractive type, the fair Parisienne; her complexion was of wax-like paleness, her blonde hair broke into little waves and tendrils under her Pierrot hat, while her eyes, clear and blue, proclaimed her extreme youth.  As she stood now, clinging to the elder woman’s arm, her mind showed itself in an utter naturalness, an utter disregard of the fact that she was observed.  Max remembered Blake’s words—­“These are true citizens of the true Bohemia.”

But the woman Lize had turned at her cry, and laid a plump, jewelled hand over her slim, nervous fingers.

“Jacqueline!  My child, what is wrong?”

“He is here!  And Lucien is here!  And I am afraid!”

The words were vague, but the elder woman asked for no explanation.

“Does Lucien know?”

The girl shook her head.

“And this beast—­where is he?”

The girl, silent from emotional excitement, nodded toward the opposite bar, and a light flickered up into Lize’s eyes as she scanned the crowd divided from them by the space of waxed floor, from which the Spanish dancers had just retreated.

Max raised his glass and drank some of his champagne.  His first dread of the place was gripping him again—­exciting him, confusing him.  All about him, like the scent-laden atmosphere itself, moved the crowd—­the girls of Montmartre and their cavaliers.  Everywhere was that sense of conscious enjoyment—­that grasping of the mere moment that the Parisian has reduced to a science.  It enveloped him like a veil—­the artless artificiality of Paris!  Everywhere fans emblazoned with the words Bal Tabarin fluttered like butterflies, everywhere cigar smoke mingled with the essences from the women’s clothes, but beneath it all lurked a something unanalyzed, dimly understood, that chained his imagination.  It hung about him; it crouched behind the women’s expectant eyes; then suddenly it sprang forth like an ugly beast into a perfumed garden.