While I waited for my own cab I found myself beside Mr. John Van Blarcom, who eyed me with mingled hostility and pity, as if I were a cross between a lunatic and a thief.  I returned his stare coolly; indeed, I found it braced me.  Left to myself, I had experienced a creeping doubt as to the girl’s activities and my own intelligence; but as soon as this fellow glared at me, all my confidence returned.

“Well, Mr. Bayne,” he remarked sardonically, breaking the silence, “I suppose you’re worrying for fear I’ll give you another piece of good advice.  Don’t you fret!  From now on you can hang yourself any way you want to.  I’d as soon talk to a man in a padded cell and a strait-jacket.  Only don’t blame me when the gendarmes come for you next week.”

“Oh, go to the devil!” I retorted curtly.  It was a relief; I had been wanting to say it ever since we had first met.  His jaw shot out menacingly, and for an instant he squared off from me with the look of the professional boxer; but, rather to my disappointment, he thought better of it and turned a contemptuous back.

Upon leaving Genoa I had reserved a room at the Ritz by telegraph.  I drove there now, and refreshed myself with a bath and breakfast, casting about me meanwhile for some mode of occupying the hours till noon.  There were various tasks, I knew, that should have claimed me; a visit to the police to secure a carte de sejour, the presentation of my credentials as an ambulance-driver, a polite notification to friends that I had arrived.  These things should have been my duty and pleasure, but somehow they were uninviting.  Nothing appealed to me, I realized with sudden enlightenment, except a certain appointment that I had already made.

I went out, to find that the fog was lifting and spring was in the air.  Since my dinner the previous night I had felt an odd exhilaration, a pleasure quickened by the staccato sparkle of the French tongue against my ears, the pale-blue uniforms, and gay French faces glimpsed as the train had stopped at various lighted stations.  Saluting Napoleon’s statue, I strolled up the rue de la Paix, took a table on a cafe pavement, and, ordering a glass of something fizzy for the form of it, sat content and happy, watching the whole gigantic pageant of Paris in war-time defile before my eyes.

The Cook’s tourists and their like, bane of the past, had disappeared; but all nationalities that the world holds seemed to be about.  At the next table two Russian officers, with high cheek-bones and wide-set eyes, were drinking, chatting together in their purring, unintelligible tongue.  Beyond them a party of Englishmen in khaki, cool-mannered, clear of gaze, were talking in low tones of the spring offensive.  The uniforms of France swarmed round me in all their variety, and close at hand a general, gorgeous in red and blue and gold, sat with his hand resting affectionately on the knee of a lad in the horizon blue of a simple poilu, who was so like him that I guessed them at a glance for father and son.