She smiled, and turned away.

“Have you seen much of it?”

“Enough to wish to see more.”

“When did you arrive?”

“Some time in the night,” he said, “from Cherbourg.  And I’m staying at a very grand hotel, which might be anywhere.  A man I crossed with on the steamer took me there.  I think I’d move to one of the quieter ones, the French ones, if I were a little surer of my pronunciation and the subjunctive mood.”

“You don’t mean to say you’ve been studying French!”

He coloured a little, and laughed.

“You think it ridiculous at my time of life?  I suppose you’re right.  You should have seen me trying to understand the cabmen.  The way these people talk reminds me more of a Gatling gun than anything I can think of.  It certainly isn’t human.”

“Perhaps you have come over as ambassador,” she suggested.  “When I saw you in the cab, even before I recognized you, I thought of a bit of our soil broken off and drifted over here.”

Her voice did not quite sustain the lighter note—­the emotion his visit was causing her was too great.  He brought with him into her retreat not so much a flood of memories as of sensations.  He was a man whose image time with difficulty obliterates, whose presence was a shining thing:  so she had grown to value it in proportion as she had had less of it.  She did inevitably recall the last time she had seen him, in the little Western city, and how he had overwhelmed her, invaded her with doubts and aroused the spirit which had possessed her to fight fiercely for its foothold.  And to-day his coming might be likened to the entrance of a great physician into the room of a distant and lonely patient whom amidst wide ministrations he has not forgotten.  She saw now that he had been right.  She had always seen it, clearly indeed when he had been beside her, but the spirit within her had been too strong, until now.  Now, when it had plundered her soul of treasures—­once so little valued—­it had fled.  Such were her thoughts.

The great of heart undoubtedly possess this highest quality of the physician,—­if the statement may thus be put backhandedly,—­and Peter Erwin instinctively understood the essential of what was going on within her.  He appeared to take a delight in the fancy she had suggested; that he had brought a portion of the newer world to France.

“Not a piece of the Atlantic coast, certainly,” he replied.  “One of the muddy islands, perhaps, of the Mississippi.”

“All the more representative,” she said.  “You seem to have taken possession of Paris, Peter—­not Paris of you.  You have annexed the seat of the Capets, and brought democracy at last into the Faubourg.”

“Without a Reign of Terror,” he added quizzically.

“If you are not ambassador, what are you?” she asked.  “I have expected at any moment to read in the Figaro that you were President of the United States.”