“But surely, madam, this is not all!” I remarked, when her two boxes had been lightly searched.  She caught my meaning.  Where was her husband’s portmanteau?

“Mr. Baker’s portmanteau was left behind at Boulogne—­there was some mistake; I don’t know what exactly.  I——­”

At this moment she marked an expression of anxiety in my face.  She gave a sharp scream, that vibrated through the gloomy hall and startled the bystanders.  “Was madame ill?  Would she have some eau sucree?” She had fainted! and her head lay upon my arm!

Unhappy little head, why stir again?

CHAPTER XII.

MRS. DAKER.

“You must come, my dear fellow.  You know, when I promise you a pleasant evening I don’t disappoint you.  You’ll meet everybody.  You dine with me. Sole Joinville, at Philippe’s—­best to be had, I think—­and a bird.  In the cool, the Madrid for our coffee, and so gently back.  I’ll drop you at your door—­leave you for an hour to paint the lily, and then fetch and take you.  You shall not say me nay.”

I protested a little, but I was won.  I had a couple of days to spend in Paris, and, like a man on the wing, had no particular engagements.

We met, my host and I, at the Napolitain.  He knew everybody, and was everybody’s favourite.  Cosmo Bertram, once guardsman, then fashionable saunterer wherever society was gayest, quietly extravagant and sentimentally dissipated, had, after much flitting about the sunny centres of the Continent, settled down to Paris and a happy place in the English society that has agglomerated in the west of Napoleon’s capital.  Fortunately for his “little peace of mind”—­as he described a shrewd, worldly head—­he was put down by the dowagers, after some sharp discussions of his antecedents, as “no match.”  There was the orphan daughter of a Baronet who had some hundred and twenty a year, and tastes which she hoped one day to satisfy by annexing a creature wearing a hat, and a pocket with ten times that sum.  She had thought for a moment of Cosmo Bertram when she had enjoyed her first half-hour of his amusing rattle; but she had been quickly undeceived—­Bertram could not have added a chicken to her broth, a pair of gloves to her toilette; so she shut up the thing she called a heart, for lack of some fitter name, and cruised again through the ominous gold rings of her glasses round the salons, and hoped the growing taste for travel might send her some one for annexation at last.

“We’re jigging on pretty much as usual,” Bertram said at Philippe’s.  “Plenty of scandal and plenty of reason for it.  The demand creates the supply—­is that sound political economy?”

“I am surprised that political economy, together with an intimate acquaintance with hydrostatics, are not exacted in these mad examination days from a queen’s messenger; but I am not bound not to be a fool in political economy, so I elect to be one.”