“This is very strange, Mr. Bayne,” she was saying idly.  “I understood that you were to drive an ambulance at the Front.”

How young, how lovely, how glowing she looked as she stood there in her snowy dress.  I found myself wondering impersonally what had led her to these devious paths.

“So I am,” I responded with accentuated coolness.  “My time is valuable; it was a sacrifice to come to Bleau; but I had no choice.  What’s wrong, Miss Falconer?  You don’t object to my presence surely?  If you go on freezing me like this, I shall think there’s something about my turning up here that worries you—­upon my soul I shall!”

She should by rights have been trembling, but her eyes blazed at me disdainfully.  I felt almost like a caitiff, whatever that may be.

“It doesn’t worry me,” she denied, with the same crisp iciness, “but it does surprise me.  Will you tell me, please, what you are doing here?”

Should I return, “And you?” in a voice of obvious meaning?  Should I take a leaf from the book of my hostess and say:  “I’m a bit of an artist.  I’ve sketched all over Europe, and I’ve come to have a go at the old mill that so many fellows try?” Such a claim would just match the assumption of her costume.  But no.

“The fact is,” I said serenely, “I came straight from the rue St. Dominique to keep the appointment you forgot.”

The announcement, it was plain, exasperated her, for slightly, but undeniably, she stamped one arched, slender, attractively shod foot.

“Mr. Bayne,” she demanded, “are you a secret-service agent?”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, startled.  “No!”

“Then I’m sorry.  That would have been a better reason for following me than—­than the only one there is,” she swept on stormily.  “You knew I didn’t wish to see any one at present.  I said so in the note I left.  Yet you spied on me and you tracked me deliberately, when I had trusted you with my address.  It’s outrageous of you.  You ought to be ashamed of doing it, Mr. Bayne.”

A stunned realization burst on me of the line that she was taking, the position into which, willy-nilly, she was crowding me.  I had trailed her here, she assumed, to thrust my company on her; and, upon the surface, I had to own that my behavior really had that air.  If I had followed her with equal brazenness along Fifth Avenue, I should have had a chance to explain my conduct to the first police officer who noticed it, later to an indignant magistrate.  But, heavens and earth!  She knew why I had come.  And knowing, how did she dare defy me?  I retained just sufficient presence of mind to stare back impassively and to mumble with feeble sarcasm: 

“I’m very sorry you think so.”

She came down a step.

“Are you?” she asked imperiously.  “Then—­will you prove it?  Will you go back to Paris by to-night’s train?”

I had recovered myself.

“There isn’t any train to-night,” I protested, civil, but adamant.  “And—­I’m sorry, but if there was I wouldn’t take it—­not until I’ve accomplished what I came to do!”