“I shall be delighted, if I am here,” Audrey stammered, and she rose.  “You are a very kind woman.  Very, very amiable.  You do not know how much I admire you.  I wish I was like you.  But I am not.  You have seen only one side of me.  You should see the inside.  It is very strange.  I must go to London.  I am forced to go to London.  I should be a coward if I did not go to London.  Tell me, is my dress really good?  Or is it a deception?”

Madame Piriac smiled, and kissed her on both cheeks.

“It is good,” said Madame Piriac.  “But your maid is not all that she ought to be.  However, it is good.”

“If you had simply praised it, and only that, I should not have been content,” said Audrey, and kissed Madame Piriac in the English way, the youthful and direct way.

Not another word about the male sex, the female sex, tradition or individualism, passed between them.

Mr. Gilman was summoned to take Audrey across the river to the right bank.  They went in a taxi.  He was protective and very silent.  But just as the cab was turning out of the Rue de Rivoli into the Rue Castiglione he said: 

“I shall obey you absolutely, Mrs. Moncreiff.  It is a great pleasure for an old, lonely man to keep a secret for a young and charming woman.  A greater pleasure than you can possibly imagine.  You may count on me.  I am not a talker, but you have put me under an obligation, and I am very grateful.”

She took care that her thanks should reward him.

“Winnie,” she burst out in the rose-coloured secrecy of the bedroom, “has Elise gone to bed? ...  All right.  Well, I’m lost.  Madame Piniac is going to England to fetch me.”

CHAPTER XX

PAGET GARDENS

“Has anything happened in this town?” asked Audrey of Miss Ingate.

It was the afternoon of the day following their arrival in London from Paris, and it was a fine afternoon.  They were walking from the Charing Cross Hotel, where they had slept, to Paget Gardens.

“Anything happened?” repeated Miss Ingate.  “What you mean?  I don’t see anything vehy particular on the posters.”

“Everybody looks so sad and worried, compared with people in Paris.”

“So they do!  So they do!” cried Miss Ingate.  “Oh, yes!  So they do!  I wondered what it was seemed so queer.  That’s it.  Well, of course you mustn’t forget we’re in England.  I always did say it was a vehy peculiar place.”

“Do we look like that?” Audrey suggested.

“I expect we do.”

“I’m quite sure that I don’t, Winnie, anyway.  I’m really very cheerful.  I’m surprisingly cheerful.”

It was true.  Also she both looked and felt more girlish than ever in Paris.  Impossible to divine, watching her in her light clothes, and with her airy step, that she was the relict of a man who had so tragically died of blood-poisoning caused by bad table manners.