very pleasantly. "Don't tell me," she said. "I've been in Scotland for the shooting of the grouse. There is no Scotsman too sentimental to make money. What part of Scotland did you say you came from? La! la! la! And at your age, too!"

"On the contrary, the older I grow the more sentimental I become."

Pauline shook her head. "Mon Dieu!" she said; "every one knows that sentiment ends at forty."

The waiter, a quick-witted rogue enough, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying this midnight conversation. He stood with one arm akimbo, the other resting on the table, and grinned like a vulgar Mephistopheles. "If sentiment ends at forty," he said, "you, mademoiselle, will suffer from it for a long time to come."

"Ma foi, no! No suffering for me," Pauline replied. "I'm a very practical person. It would take a great deal to make me sentimental."

"I wonder how much?" the man answered. "A nice little hotel with a good trade, say?"

Pauline shrugged her shoulders. "No, that would mean work. I am used to seeing a life of sentiment without work."

The waiter once more began to clear the table. "It is a pity we see so much of what we cannot have," he answered, rattling the coffee-cups and silver.

Pauline made no reply to this, but stood by the fireplace in silence watching the waiter, and showing plainly by her manner that the conversation was over and that she was waiting for him to go.

Suddenly she started violently, as Jacques did also.

The heavy mahogany door leading to the corridor outside was flung open, and a short, thick-set, bearded Frenchman came briskly into the room. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him. He might have been an ordinary commercial traveller, save for a pair of singularly alert eyes, which glanced rapidly hither and thither and took in the whole room in one comprehensive sweep. This was done with lightning-like rapidity, and then the fellow's face assumed an expression of great surprise—a little bit overdone and too forced to seem real.

"A thousand pardons!" he said, with a bow. "The wrong room! My mistake! I am very sorry. Accept my apologies."

With that he once more glanced round the room and left it, though with not quite the alacrity of his entrance, closing the door quietly behind him.

But into the quiet room something strangely disturbing had come.

It was no longer a confidential maid gossiping with the casual waiter of a smart hotel. The air, which had before been charged with little suspicions, toy fencings, as it were, between people of no great importance, was now informed with something more pressing, more imminent, more real.

Pauline herself positively staggered back from the fireplace towards the table, and nearer to the waiter. Her brown face became grey, she seemed for a moment to lose control of herself, while the ferret eyes of the waiter watched her with an excited glitter in them.

"That man!" ... The exclamation came from Pauline almost like a cry. "That man!"

Jacques was all bent to attention. He hurried up to the woman. "Yes, yes?" he said.

"Do you know who he is?" Pauline asked. "Have you seen him before, M. Jacques?"

The man watched her keenly. "I don't know, mademoiselle," he answered in a guarded voice.

"That man, I say—have you seen him before?... I remember."

The waiter hastened to agree, obviously wishing to discover the reason of Pauline's agitation.

"Yes," he said. "Now you mention it, mademoiselle, I remember too. He was outside—there—in the corridor—just after I had shown M. Collingwood and you and madame to your rooms."

"Was that when we arrived?" Pauline asked. Her brown hands were trembling, her eyes were informed with anxiety.

Jacques bent his head forward. The two were vis-à-vis—he watched her intently.

"Yes," he answered.

Then Pauline seemed to lose all her caution. She threw up her hands and her face became wrinkled with excitement.

"La! la!" she cried, "but he was looking at madame's boxes at Boulogne...."

With quiet but hurried steps she went up to the door leading to the corridor, turned the handle gently, flung it open and gazed out.

There was obviously nobody there, for in a moment she returned, closed the door, and once more confronted the waiter with a grey and troubled face.

"Que diable fait-il?" she said in a frightened voice. "But M. Jacques, what can it mean?"

Again the ugly leer came over the garçon's face. "Sentiment," he said.

The middle-aged Breton woman pressed both hands to her heart with one of those wild and expressive Celtic gestures which seem so exaggerated to English folk, but which are, nevertheless, so truly expressive of emotion.

"Madame!" she cried.

"I was not thinking of madame," Jacques answered quickly.

As if clutching at a hope, Pauline made a tremendous effort to get in key with her tormentor.

"No, no!" she said with an affectation of brightness. "What? Is it that you were thinking of me? Merci!—that would be funny!"

"Sans doute. That's what they say in England when they advertise 'No followers.'"

The woman caught the last word. Her face had been strained in anxious thought.

"Followers!" she said. "Even the English do not expect followers from London to Paris."

By this time Jacques had filled his tray, had folded up the shining white table-cloth and placed it over his pyramid of plates.

"Mademoiselle is too modest," he said, moving towards the door, but still watching Pauline intently.

The creature's ears seemed literally to twitch with greed of news as he crossed the great quiet room.

Pauline was speaking to herself. "It's queer," she said. "I do not like that. Everything has gone wrong to-day. First we nearly missed the train. Then on the boat we were all seasick. Then the douanier was a suspicious fool. Then at Boulogne we got on the wrong train and lost Lord Ellerdine and Lady Attwill——"

A little hard chuckle of amusement came from the retiring waiter, and as Pauline turned to him in indignation a distant voice called her name:

"Pauline!"

"Madame!"

"Good night, mademoiselle," the waiter said, one hand supporting the heavy tray, the other upon the handle of the door. "Good night, mademoiselle. Remember that Jock from Ecclefechan has a good memory."

Pauline was trembling, but she turned to the fellow. "Good night, Jock from——" She spluttered in her throat, laughed artificially, shut the door after the man, and then turned eagerly towards the door which led to Mrs. Admaston's bedroom.

There was a note of tremendous relief in her voice as she cried out "Madame!" once more.

The door from the bedroom opened and Mrs. Admaston entered.

She was a slim, girlish-looking woman, with a cascade of long dark hair falling over her shoulders.

The face was small, the complexion of it rose-brown, the eyes dark wells of laughing light, the lips twin rosebuds with a sense of humour.

She was wearing a long wrap, half tea-gown, half dressing-gown, of topaz-coloured silk, and round her slender waist was a cord of light-blue and gold threads ending in two large tassels of gold.

Now there was something half tired, half petulant, and wholly puzzled about her face as she swept into the room.

"It's no use," she said in a rippling musical voice; "it isn't a bit of use, Pauline! I can't go to sleep. In fact, I'm not in the least sleepy."

She looked round the room and sighed.

"What a barn of a place this is!" she said. "I hate those green curtains. They're so horribly conscious of the colour scheme. And then the topaz-shaded lights over the lamps—it's all so dreadfully wearing. And in my room, too, Pauline, it's simply horrid. It reminds me of a sarcophagus, or a mausoleum, or some appalling place like that. And the bed is too low! I don't think much of this room, but after all it's nicer in here."

She sank down with a sigh into an