In the outward seeming, at least, it was all that the most fastidious could have required; a gem of Renaissance architecture in its turrets, its quaint, scrolled windows, and the carving of its stone facade.  Age and romance breathed from every inch of it.  For not less than four hundred years it had watched the changing life of Paris; and even to a lay person like myself a glance proclaimed it one of those ancestral hotels, the pride of noble French families, about which many romantic stories cling.

At another time it would have charmed me hugely, but to-day, as I stood gazing, somehow, my spirits fell.  Was it the almost sepulchral silence of the place, the careful drawing of every shutter, the fact that the grilled gateway leading to the court of honor was locked?  I did not know; I don’t know yet; but I had an odd, eerie feeling.  It seemed like a place of waiting, of watching, and of gloom.

This was unreasonable; it was even down-right ridiculous.  I began to think that late events were throwing me off my base.  “It’s a house like any other, and a jolly fine old one!” I assured myself, approaching the grilled entrance and producing one of my cards.

An entirely modern electric button was installed there, beneath a now merely ornamental knocker in grotesque gargoyle form.  I pressed it, peering through the iron latticework at the stately court.  The answer was prompt.  Down the steps of the hotel came a white-headed majordomo, gorgeously arrayed, and so pictorial that he might have been a family retainer stepping from the pages of an old tale.

There was something queer about him, I thought, as he crossed the courtyard; just as there was about the house, I appended doggedly, with growing belief.  His air was tremulous, his step slow, his gaze far-off and anxious.

“For Miss Falconer, who waits for me,” I announced in French, offering him my card through the grille.

He bowed to me with the deference of a Latin, the grand manner of an ambassador; but he made no motion to let me in.

“Mademoiselle,” he replied, “sends all her excuses, all her regrets to monsieur, but she leaves Paris within the hour and, therefore may not receive.”

I had feared it for a good sixty seconds.  None the less, it was a blow to me.  My suspicions, never more than half laid, promptly raised their heads again.

“Have the kindness,” I requested, with a calm air of command that I had known to prove hypnotic, “to convey my card to mademoiselle, and to say that I beg of her, before her departure, one little instant of speech.”

But the old fellow’s faded blue eyes were gazing past me, hopelessly sad, supremely mournful.  What the deuce ailed him?  I wondered angrily.  The thing was almost weird.  Of a sudden, with irritation, yet with dread, too, I felt myself on the threshold of a house of tragedy.  The man might, from the look of him, have been watching some loved young master’s bier.