“One American drink, as they used to concoct it in that bar, was generally enough for most of our customers, but he, before he left, contrived to put away three; also contriving, during the same short space of time, to inform ‘Mam’sel Marie’ that Paris, since he had looked into her eyes, had become the only town worth living in, so far as he was concerned, throughout the whole universe.  He had his failings, had Master Tom Sleight, but shyness wasn’t one of them.  She gave him a smile when he left that would have brought a less impressionable young man than he back again to that Cafe; but for the rest of the day I noticed ‘Mam’sel Marie’ frowned to herself a good deal, and was quite unusually cynical in her view of things in general.

“Next afternoon he found his way to us again, and much the same sort of thing went on, only a little more of it.  A sailor-man, so I am told, makes love with his hour of departure always before his mind, and so gets into the habit of not wasting time.  He gave her short lessons in English, for which she appeared to be grateful, and she at his request taught him the French for ‘You are just charming!  I love you!’ with which, so he explained, it was his intention, on his return to England, to surprise his mother.  He turned up again after dinner, and the next day before lunch, when after that I looked up and missed him at his usual table, the feeling would come to me that business was going down.  Marie always appeared delighted to see him, and pouted when he left; but what puzzled me at the time was, that though she fooled him to the top of his bent, she flirted every bit as much, if not more, with her other customers—­leastways with the nicer ones among them.  There was one young Frenchman in particular—­a good-looking chap, a Monsieur Flammard, son of the painter.  Up till then he’d been making love pretty steadily to Miss Marie, as, indeed, had most of ’em, without ever getting much forrarder; for hitherto a chat about the weather, and a smile that might have meant she was in love with you or might have meant she was laughing at you—­no man could ever tell which,—­was all the most persistent had got out of her.  Now, however, and evidently to his own surprise, young Monsieur Flammard found himself in clover.  Provided his English rival happened to be present and not too far removed, he could have as much flirtation as he wanted, which, you may take it, worked out at a very tolerable amount.  Master Tom could sit and scowl, and for the matter of that did; but as Marie would explain to him, always with the sweetest of smiles, her business was to be nice to all her customers, and to this, of course, he had nothing to reply:  that he couldn’t understand a word of what she and Flammard talked and laughed about didn’t seem to make him any the happier.

“Well, this sort of thing went on for perhaps a fortnight, and then one morning over our dejeune, when she and I had the Cafe entirely to ourselves, I took the opportunity of talking to Mam’sel Marie like a father.