Paris had an air of gaiety, a sparkle over its star-shape which almost annoyed Soames.  He stepped gravely, his nose lifted a little sideways in real curiosity.  He desired now to understand things French.  Was not Annette French?  There was much to be got out of his visit, if he could only get it.  In this laudable mood and the Place de la Concorde he was nearly run down three times.  He came on the ‘Cours la Reine,’ where Irene’s hotel was situated, almost too suddenly, for he had not yet fixed on his procedure.  Crossing over to the river side, he noted the building, white and cheerful-looking, with green sunblinds, seen through a screen of plane-tree leaves.  And, conscious that it would be far better to meet her casually in some open place than to risk a call, he sat down on a bench whence he could watch the entrance.  It was not quite eleven o’clock, and improbable that she had yet gone out.  Some pigeons were strutting and preening their feathers in the pools of sunlight between the shadows of the plane-trees.  A workman in a blue blouse passed, and threw them crumbs from the paper which contained his dinner.  A ‘bonne’ coiffed with ribbon shepherded two little girls with pig-tails and frilled drawers.  A cab meandered by, whose cocher wore a blue coat and a black-glazed hat.  To Soames a kind of affectation seemed to cling about it all, a sort of picturesqueness which was out of date.  A theatrical people, the French!  He lit one of his rare cigarettes, with a sense of injury that Fate should be casting his life into outlandish waters.  He shouldn’t wonder if Irene quite enjoyed this foreign life; she had never been properly English—­even to look at!  And he began considering which of those windows could be hers under the green sunblinds.  How could he word what he had come to say so that it might pierce the defence of her proud obstinacy?  He threw the fag-end of his cigarette at a pigeon, with the thought:  ’I can’t stay here for ever twiddling my thumbs.  Better give it up and call on her in the late afternoon.’  But he still sat on, heard twelve strike, and then half-past.  ‘I’ll wait till one,’ he thought, ‘while I’m about it.’  But just then he started up, and shrinkingly sat down again.  A woman had come out in a cream-coloured frock, and was moving away under a fawn-coloured parasol.  Irene herself!  He waited till she was too far away to recognise him, then set out after her.  She was strolling as though she had no particular objective; moving, if he remembered rightly, toward the Bois de Boulogne.  For half an hour at least he kept his distance on the far side of the way till she had passed into the Bois itself.  Was she going to meet someone after all?  Some confounded Frenchman—­one of those ‘Bel Ami’ chaps, perhaps, who had nothing to do but hang about women—­for he had read that book with difficulty and a sort of disgusted fascination.  He followed doggedly along a shady alley, losing sight of her