The concierge’s wife, after curiosity concerning tennis, grew confidential about herself, and more confidential.  And at last she lowered her tones, and with sparkling eyes communicated information to Audrey in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

“Oh! truly?  I must go,” hastily said Audrey, blushing, and off she ran, reduced in an instant to the schoolgirl.  Her departure was a retreat.  These occasional discomfitures made a faint blot on the excellence of being a widow.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SWOON

In the north-east corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, where the lawn-tennis courts were permitted by a public authority which was strangely impartial and cosmopolitan in the matter of games, Miss Ingate sat sketching a group of statuary with the Rue de Vaugirard behind it.  She was sketching in the orthodox way, on the orthodox stool, with the orthodox combined paint-box and easel, and the orthodox police permit in the cover of the box.

The bright and warm weather was tonic; it accounted for the whole temperament of Parisians.  Under such a sky, with such a delicate pricking vitalisation in the air, it was impossible not to be Parisian.  The trees, all arranged in beautiful perspectives, were coming into leaf, and through their screens could be seen everywhere children shouting as they played at ball and top, and both kinds of nurses, and scores of perambulators and mothers, and a few couples dallying with their sensations, and old men reading papers, and old women knitting and relating anecdotes or entire histories.  And nobody was curious beyond his own group.  The people were perfectly at home in this grandiose setting of gardens and fountains and grey palaces, with theatres, boulevards and the odour and roar of motor-buses just beyond the palisades.  And Miss Ingate in the exciting sunshine gazed around with her subdued Essex grin, as if saying:  “It’s the most topsy-turvy planet that I was ever on, and why am I, of all people, trying to make this canvas look like a piece of sculpture and a street?”

“Now, Miss Ingate,” said tall red-haired Tommy, who was standing over her.  “Before you go any farther, do look at the line of roofs and see how interesting it is; it’s really full of interest.  And you’ve simply not got on speaking terms with it yet.”

“No more I have!  No more I have!” cried Miss Ingate, glancing round at Audrey, who was swinging her racket.  “Thank you, Tommy.  I ought to have thought of it for my own sake, because roofs are so much easier than statues, and I must get an effect somewhere, mustn’t I?”

Tommy winked at Audrey.  But Tommy’s wink was as naught to the great invisible wink of Miss Ingate, the everlasting wink that derided the universe and the sun himself.

Then Musa appeared, with paraphernalia, at the end of a path.  Accompanying him was a specimen of the creature known on tennis lawns as “a fourth.”  He was almost nameless, tall, very young, with the seedlings of a moustache and a space of nude calf between his knickerbockers and his socks.  He was very ceremonious, shy, ungainly and blushful.  He played a fair-to-middling game; and nothing more need be said of him.