“Well, Carlotta is—­Carlotta.  A terrific swell, and a bit of a Tartar.  We quarrel every time we meet, which isn’t often.  She tries to play the elder sister game on me, and I won’t have it.  Though she is elder—­very much elder, you now.  But I think her worst point is that she’s so frightfully mysterious.  You can never tell what she’s up to.  Now, a man I met at supper last night told me he thought he had seen Carlotta in Bloomsbury yesterday.  However, I didn’t believe that, because she is expecting me in Paris; we happen to be as thick as thieves just now, and if she had been in London, she would have looked me up.”

“Just so,” I replied, wondering whether I should endeavor to obtain from Marie Deschamps information which would be useful to Rosa.

By the time that the star of the Diana had said goodbye to certain male acquaintances, and had gone through a complicated dialogue with her maid on the subject of dress-trunks, the clock pointed almost to nine, and a porter rushed us—­Marie and myself—­into an empty compartment of a composite coach near to the engine.  The compartment was first class, but it evidently belonged to an ancient order of rolling stock, and the vivacious Marie criticized it with considerable freedom.  The wind howled, positively howled, in the station.

“I wish I wasn’t going,” said the lady.  “I shall be horribly ill.”

“You probably will,” I said, to tease her, idly opening the Globe.  “It seems that the morning steamer from Calais wasn’t able to make either Dover or Folkestone, and has returned to Calais.  Imagine the state of mind of the passengers!”

“Ugh!  Oh, Mr. Foster, what is that case by your side?”

“It is a jewel-case.”

“What a big one!”

She did not conceal her desire to see the inside of it, but I felt that I could not, even to satisfy her charming curiosity, expose the interior of Rosa’s jewel-case in a railway carriage, and so I edged away from the topic with as much adroitness as I was capable of.

The pretty girl pouted, and asked me for the Globe, behind which she buried herself.  She kept murmuring aloud extracts from the Globe’s realistic description of the weather, and then she jumped up.

“I’m not going.”

“Not going?”

“No.  The weather’s too awful.  These newspaper accounts frighten me.”

“But the Casino de Paris?”

“A fig for it!  They must wait for me, that’s all.  I’ll try again to-morrow.  Will you mind telling the guard to get my boxes out, there’s a dear Mr. Foster, and I’ll endeavor to find that maid of mine?”

The train was already five minutes late in starting; she delayed it quite another five minutes, and enjoyed the process.  And it was I who meekly received the objurgations of porters and guard.  My reward was a smile, given with a full sense of its immense value.

“Good-by, Mr. Foster.  Take care of your precious jewel-case.”