“Are you taking a house in Paris?” inquired Monsieur Dauphin.

Audrey answered primly: 

“I haven’t decided.  Should you advise me to do so?”

He waved a hand.

“Ah!  It depends on the life you wish to lead.  Who knows—­with a young woman who has all experience behind her and all life before her!  But I do hope I may see you again.  And I trust I may persuade you to come to my studio again.”  Audrey felt the thrill of drama as he proceeded.  “This is scarcely a night for you.  I ought to tell you that I give three entertainments during the autumn.  To-night is the first.  It is for students and those English and Americans who think they are seeing Paris here.  Then I give another for the political and dramatic worlds.  Each is secretly proud to meet the other.  The third I reserve to my friends.  Some of my many friends in London are good enough to come over specially for it.  It is on Christmas Eve.  I do wish you would come to that one.”

“I suppose,” she said, catching the diabolic glances of Miss Ingate and Tommy, “I suppose you know almost more people in London than in Paris?”

He answered: 

“Well, I count among my friends more than two-thirds of the subscribers to
Covent Garden Opera....  By the way, do you happen to be connected with the
Moncreiffs of Suddon Wester?  They have a charming house in Hyde Park
Terrace.  But probably you know it?”

Audrey burst out laughing.  She laughed loud and violently till the tears stood in her eyes.

“Well,” he said, at a loss, deprecatingly.  “Perhaps these Moncreiffs are rather weird.”

“I was only laughing,” she said in gasps, but with a complete secret composure.  “Because we had such an awful quarrel with them last year.  I couldn’t tell you the details.  They’re too shocking.”

He gave a dubious smile.

“D’you know, dear young lady,” he recommenced after a brief pause, “I should adore to paint a portrait of you laughing.  It would be very well hung in the Salon.  Your face is so strangely expressive.  It is utterly different, in expression, from any other face I ever saw—­and I have studied faces.”

Heedless of the general interest which she was arousing, Audrey leaned on the rail of the screen of flowers, and gave herself up afresh to laughter.  Monsieur Dauphin was decidedly puzzled.  The affair might have ended in hysteria and confusion had not Miss Ingate, with Nick and Tommy, come hurrying up to the dais.

CHAPTER XI

A POLITICAL REFUGEE

“Rosamund has come to my studio and wants to see me at once. She has sent for me. Miss Ingate says she shall go, too.”

It was these words in a highly emotionalised voice from Miss Nickall that, like a vague murmured message of vast events, drew the entire quartet away from the bright inebriated scene created by Monsieur Dauphin.