"Yes," said Nancy.
"Well, write your name, then," he said, and walked back to the desk beside her. "You will see me do it too," he added, smiling, as he gave up a card and got another one in return, on the back of which he wrote "Frederick Allen."
All the employés were quite serious again, and seemed to have forgotten Nancy's existence. She signed her card, and entered the atrium at the Englishman's side.
"I am looking for my husband," she explained, and told him the story of the system, and the telegram, and the hotel. "I feel as if I had been telling all this over and over and over again, like the history of the wolf." She smiled, and the dimple dipped sweetly in her left cheek. She was flushed, and her dark hair had twisted itself into little damp ringlets on her forehead. Mr. Allen looked at her curiously.
"I am sure I have seen you before," he said. But he could not remember where. Nancy said she thought not.
"Oh, I am sure of it," said Mr. Allen. "I remember your smile."
But the smile he remembered had belonged to Valeria, when she stood on a little bridge in Hertfordshire, and took from his hands a garden hat that had fallen into the water.
They went through the rooms, and the chink, chink, of the money, and the heavy perfume, made Nancy dizzy and bewildered. Aldo was nowhere to be seen. They went from table to table—the season was ended, and one could see each player at a glance—then into the trente-et-quarante rooms, which were hushed and darkened; then through the "buffet," and out into the atrium again.
Nancy looked up at her companion, and tears gathered in her eyes. "I cannot imagine where he is! You do not think—you do not think——" And in her wide, frightened eyes passed the vision of Aldo, lifeless under a palm-tree in the gardens, his divine eyes broken, his soft hair clotted with blood.
"I think he is all right enough," said the Englishman. "We can look in the Café de Paris."