silk, there was nothing distinctively foreign about the room. The best French hotels nowadays have all adopted English and American standards of comfort. The stove, the uncarpeted and slippery parquet floor, the impossible chairs, and a ceiling painted to resemble a nightmare of a fruiterer's shop, are all things of the past.

Electric lights in softly shaded globes threw a pleasant yellow radiance over everything. A fire of cedarwood logs glowed on the tiled hearth, and a great bunch of lilac stood in a copper bowl upon a small mahogany table which was placed between two doors which faced the one leading to Mrs. Admaston's bedroom.

Some tall silver candlesticks stood upon the Broadwood piano; and there were others, in which the candles were not lit, upon brackets on either side of the telephone.

It was just upon midnight when the door of Mrs. Admaston's bedroom opened and her confidential maid and companion came into the room. Pauline Toché was a woman of some forty years of age. Her black hair streaked with grey was drawn tightly back from her forehead. The face, a little hard and watchful perhaps, nevertheless showed signs of marked intelligence. The eyes had something of the ferocity but also the fidelity of a well-trained watch-dog. She was dressed unassumingly enough in black, and she wore an apron also of some black material.

Such a face and figure may be seen a dozen times in any Breton village, and more than once her friends had said to Mrs. Admaston that Pauline seemed to require the coif of her country—the snowy white and goffered col which is worn over the shoulders; a pair of sabots even!

The maid was a Breton woman, a daughter of one of the millers of Pont-Aven, and preserved still all the characteristics of that hardy Celtic race.

As the maid entered the sitting-room there was a knock at the door, and in response to her "Entrez" a waiter came into the room. He was an odd-looking person with brilliant red hair—rather a rare thing in France, but cropped close to his head in the French manner, so that it seemed to be almost squirting out of his scalp. The man, with his napkin over his arm, his short Eton jacket, and boots soled with list, was dressed just like any other waiter in the hotel, but somehow or other there was something unusual in his aspect.

He carried a tray, and went up to a small round table, gleaming with cut-glass and silver, on which supper had been laid.

"Are you quite sure there is no train from Chalons before morning?" Pauline asked the man in French.

"No train before five o'clock, mademoiselle," the man replied. "The last fast train reaches Paris at eight-forty."

The Breton woman nodded.

"Thank you," she said, gazing at him rather keenly; and then suddenly—"You're not French, are you?"

With great precision, almost as if he was practising something learnt by rote and not entirely natural to him, the waiter clicked his heels together, spread out the palms of his hands, and bowed.

"Mais oui, mademoiselle," he said.

Pauline shook her head slightly.

"You do not deceive me," she said. "There is something about you—you are a Frenchman?"

The waiter had been piling plates up on a tray. He put the tray down on the table, smiled with a total change of manner, and answered her.

"No," he said with a grin.

"I knew it," Pauline said. "Is it then that you are Irish, M. Jacques?"

"Most certainly not," replied the waiter.

"I figure to myself that you are English?"

Jacques came up still closer to the maid, his voice dropped, and his manner became confidential. "Not even quite English, mademoiselle," he said. "I'm a Scotsman. I was born at Ecclefechan."

"Mon Dieu!" said Pauline; "Eccle——! What a name of barbarity! I did not know that there were such names. La! la! But your name, monsieur, your name—Jacques?"

"Mademoiselle speaks English?"

"Quite well," Pauline replied.

"Well, you see, miss, I've been here a long time, and I am a great favourite with the English visitors. It would never do to tell them that I'm a Scotsman, and that my real name is Jock. You see, they like to practise their French on me. The management always send me to wait upon English visitors. Of course, I can understand what they mean, and it flatters them to think that they're really speaking French. I heard an old lady the other day talking to her daughter. 'My dear,' she said, 'those extra French lessons at the High School have not been wasted. That nice, attentive French waiter understands you perfectly'; and so I did of course, miss, though when she wanted the mussels she said, 'Esker voos avvy des moulins?' And when she wanted the pastry she called it 'tapisserie' instead of 'patisserie.' So you see my French name is one of my great assets, though you, mademoiselle, saw through me very easily." Here the waiter once more relapsed into his best French manner and made a flourishing little bow. "Do you stay long in Paris, mademoiselle?" he asked, going back to the table and beginning to remove the dishes.

"I can't say," Pauline replied. "As a matter of fact, we are here quite by accident. We are really going to Switzerland."

"The wrong train?" inquired the waiter.

"Yes, that was it," Pauline answered. "We took the wrong train, and our party got divided somewhere."

"What bad luck!" Jacques answered. Then he gave a rather searching glance at Pauline. "But surely M. Collingwood knows the Continent?" he asked.

The maid gave an almost imperceptible start, and went up to the fireplace, where she began to pull about the flowers in one of the vases. "Oh yes, I think so," she answered, in a voice which strove to appear quite indifferent to the question.

"Well, I can tell you," the waiter went on—"I can tell you that M. Collingwood knows the Continent as well as a Cook's agent. He's always travelling about. You can see his name in the Riviera lists, in the Paris Daily Mail or the New York Herald. He's at Nice for the races. He's at Monte Carlo for the pigeon-shooting. He's at Marienbad for a cure, or climbing mountains in the Bernese Oberland. He is everywhere, is M. Collingwood. He was staying here last year, for instance."

The maid turned slowly from the fire and looked towards the supper-table.

"Yes, yes?" she said with some eagerness. "He is here often? At this hotel?"

"I can remember him being here three times," the man replied. And there was something rather furtive in his look, something which seemed to speak of a suppressed curiosity and watchfulness. Many waiters in smart hotels, both in London and in Paris, have this look—the veritable expression of Paul Pry. "Have you been long with Mr. and Mrs. Admaston?"

"I've been many years with madame," Pauline replied. And then, speaking rather suddenly, "You seem to have a very good memory, Mr. Jock Jacques."

"It is necessary," the man answered, with all the dryness of a Scotsman.

"And yet sometimes," Pauline replied, "it is necessary not to have a good memory."

"Perhaps," the waiter answered. "Certainly sometimes discretion is the better part of recollection," giving her a look of great slyness as he spoke.

Pauline shrugged her shoulders. There was a note of veiled contempt in her voice. "To forget easily is sometimes very convenient, n'est-ce pas?" she said.

"When it is worth more than a good memory," he answered.

"Doubtless you are very well off, Mr. Jock," Pauline continued, and this time the sneer in her voice was hardly veiled.

At this the waiter began brushing the crumbs from the table very vigorously. "I'm only a poor waiter," he said.

"Then surely that must be your own fault? There ought to be many opportunities in a hotel of this sort of making a good use of a convenient memory?"

"Well, yes, you're right there," came from the man, with a rather ill-favoured leer. "But, you see, I am too sentimental for that."

Pauline laughed in answer, and not