“Hadn’t you better take him home, Mrs. Moncreiff?” Tommy suggested.  “You can get a taxi here in the Rue de Vaugirard.”  She did not smile, but her green eyes glinted.

“Yes, I will,” said Audrey curtly.

And Tommy’s eyes glinted still more.

“And I shall get a doctor,” said Audrey.  “His arm may be broken.”

“I should,” Tommy concurred with gravity.

“Well, if it is, I can’t set it,” said Miss Ingate quizzically.  “I was getting on so well with the high lights on that statue.  I’ll come along back to the studio in about half an hour.”

The fourth, who had been hovering near like a criminal magnetised by his crime, bounded off furiously at the suggestion that he should stop a taxi at the entrance to the gardens.

“I hope he has broken his arm and he can never play any more,” thought Audrey, astoundingly, as she and the fourth helped pale Musa into the open taxi.  “It will just serve those two right.”  She meant Miss Ingate and Tommy.

No sooner did the taxi start than Musa began to cry.  He did not seem to care that he was in the midst of a busy street, with a piquant widow by his side.

CHAPTER XIV

MISS INGATE POINTS OUT THE DOOR

“Why did you cry this afternoon, Musa?”

Musa made no reply.

Audrey was lighting the big lamp in the Moncreiff-Ingate studio.  It made exactly the same moon as it had made on the night in the previous autumn when Audrey had first seen it.  She had brought Musa to the studio because she did not care to take him to his own lodgings. (As a fact, nobody that she knew, except Musa, had ever seen Musa’s lodgings.) This was almost the first moment they had had to themselves since the visit of the little American doctor from the Rue Servandoni.  The rumour of Musa’s misfortune had spread through the Quarter like the smell of a fire, and various persons of both sexes had called to inspect, to sympathise, and to take tea, which Audrey was continually making throughout the late afternoon.  Musa had had an egg for his tea, and more than one girl had helped to spread the yolk and the white on pieces of bread-and-butter, for the victim of destiny had his right arm in a sling.  Audrey had let them do it, as a mother patronisingly lets her friends amuse her baby.

In the end they had all gone; Tommy had enigmatically looked in and gone, and Miss Ingate had gone to dine at the favourite restaurant of the hour in the Rue Leopold Robert.  Audrey had refused to go, asserting that which was not true; namely, that she had had an enormous tea, including far too many petits fours.  Miss Ingate in departing had given a glance at her sketch (fixed on the easel), and another at Audrey, and another at Musa, all equally ironic and kindly.