“Mademoiselle regrets greatly,” he intoned, “but she may not receive.  Mademoiselle sends this letter to monsieur that he may understand.”  He passed me, through the locked grille, a slender missive; then he saluted me once more and, still staring before him with that fixed, uncanny look, withdrew.

CHAPTER XII

THE GRAY CAR

I was divided between exasperation and pity.  The old fellow was in a bad way; I felt sorry for him.  Dunny had an ancient butler, a household institution, who had presided over our destinies since my childhood and would, I fancied, look something like this if he should hear that I was dead.  But in heaven’s name, what was wrong here, and was nothing in the world clear and aboveboard any longer?  On the chance that the letter might enlighten me I tore open the envelope and read with mixed feelings the following note: 

DEAR Mr. BAYNE: 

The news that I found waiting for me was not good, as I had hoped.  It was bad, very bad—­as bad as news can be.  I must leave Paris at once, and I can see no one, talk to no one, before I go.  Please believe that I am sorry, and that I shall never forget the kindness you showed me on the ship.

Sincerely yours,

ESME FALCONER.

That was all.  Well, the episode was ended—­ended, moreover, with a good deal of cavalierness.  She had treated me like a meddlesome, pertinacious idiot who had insisted on calling and had to be taught his place.  This was a Christian country where the formalities of life prevailed; I could not—­unless escorted and countenanced by gendarmes—­seize upon a club and batter down that grille.

I was resentful, wrathful, in the very deuce of a humor.  Black gloom settled over me.  I admitted that Van Blarcom had been right.  I recalled the girl’s vague explanations as we sat over our dinner; her denials, unbolstered save by my willingness to accept them; all the chain of incriminating circumstances that I had pondered over in the cab.  Her charm and the mystery that enveloped her had thrilled and stirred me; she had seen it.  To gain a few hours’ leeway she had once again duped me; and this hotel, with its deceptive air of family and respectability, was a blind, a rendezvous, another such setting for intrigue as the St. Ives.

Her work might be already accomplished.  Perhaps she had left Paris.  I told myself with some savageness that I did not know and did not care.  From the first my presence in this luridly adventurous galley had been incongruous; I would get back with all despatch to the Ritz and the orderly world it typified.

I had gone perhaps twenty feet when a grating noise attracted me.  Glancing back across my shoulder, I saw that the old majordomo was unlocking and setting wide the gate.  The hum of a self-starter reached me faintly, and a moment later there rolled slowly forth a dark-blue touring-car of luxurious aspect, driven by a chauffeur whose coat and cap and goggles gave him rather the appearance of a leather brownie, and bearing in the tonneau Miss Falconer, elaborately coated and veiled.