CHAPTER XIII

AT THE THREE KINGS

“What’s the best hotel in the place?” I inquired somewhat dubiously.  The man in the blouse, who had performed the three functions of opening my compartment-door, carrying my bag to the gate, and relieving me of my ticket, achieved a thoroughly Gallic shrug.

“Monsieur,” said he, “what shall I tell you?  The best hotel, the worst hotel—­these are one.  There is only the Hotel des Trois Rois in the town of Bleau.  Let monsieur proceed by the street of the Three Kings and he will reach it.  Formerly there was an omnibus, but now the horses are taken.  And if they remained, who could drive them with all the men at the war?”

Carrying my bag and feeling none too amiable, I set off along the indicated route.  In Paris, rushing from the rue St.-Dominique to Cook’s office, from that office to the hotel, from the hotel to the gare, I had been a sort of whirling dervish with no time for sober thought.  My trip of four hours on a slow, stuffy, crowded train had, however, afforded me ample leisure; and I had spent the time in grimly envisaging the possibilities that, I decided, were most likely to befall.

First and foremost disagreeable; that the men in the gray automobile were helping Miss Falconer in some nefarious business.  In this case, it would be up to me to fight the gentlemen single-handed, rescue the girl, and escort her back to Paris, all without scandal.  Easier said than done!

Second possibility:  that Miss falconer, pausing at Bleau only en route, might already have departed, and that I would be left with my journey for my pains.

Third:  that the gray car had no connection with her; that she had some entirely blameless errand.  I hoped so, I was sure.  If this proved true, I was bound to stand branded as a meddling, officious idiot, one who, in defiance of the most elementary social rules, persisted in trailing her against her will.  Vastly pleasant, indeed!

Fuming, I shifted my bag from one hand to the other and walked faster.  Night was falling, but it was not yet really dark, and I formed a clear enough notion of the village as I traversed it.  It was one of the hundreds of its kind which make an artists’ paradise of France.  Entirely unmodernized, it was the more picturesque for that.  If I tripped sometimes on the roughly paved street I could console myself with the knowledge that these cobbles, like the odd, jutting houses rising on both sides of them, were at least three hundred years old.  Green woods, clear against a background of rosy sunset, ran up to the very borders of the town.  I passed a little, gray old church.  I crossed a quaint bridge built over a winding stream lined with dwellings and broken by mossy washing-stones.  It was all very peaceful, very simple, and very rustic.  Without second sight I could not possibly have visioned the grim little drama for which it was to serve as setting.