Paul laughed and his face cleared.
“Don’t be an idiot, Gerard. It isn’t that.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
The look of perplexity returned to Ravenel’s eyes.
“I have seen her,” he said.
“Seen whom?” asked Gerard.
“Your Marguerite Lambert. At least, I think so. It must have been she.”
There was a real note of distress in Paul’s voice which Gerard de Montignac was quite at a loss to understand. He turned in his chair and looked into the saloon. Between the doorway and the tables a few couples were revolving, but the women were of the type native to such places, their countenances plastered with paint, a fixed smile upon their lips, and a deliberate archness in their expression, and in their features the haggard remains of what even at its bloom so many years ago could have been no more than a vulgar comeliness.
“She is sitting at the big table with those half-drunken Levantines,” said Paul. “What is she doing amongst them?” He asked the question in a voice of bewilderment and pity. “Why is she here at all—a child!”
Suddenly the hard uproar of the piano ceased, the dancers stopped their gyrations, with the abruptness of mechanical figures whose works have run down, and sauntered to their chairs. Gerard could now see the big table but there was such a cluster of men about it, gesticulating and shouting, that Gerard de Montignac was moved to disgust.