Ephraim was dazed for some minutes, and then he tried to follow his friend, but found Frank had disappeared.
Frank did not stop until he was outside of the Ambassadeurs’ and some distance away. Then he realized that Ephraim was not with him, and he looked around.
“I can’t bother with him now,” he muttered. “He will find his way back to the hotel. That woman is somewhere just ahead.”
He saw a woman that seemed to look like the unknown, but when he reached her side, he found that her face was not masked, and the look she gave him made him turn quickly away.
Still he was not satisfied. That might be the woman, it might be she had disposed of the mask. So he followed her to the Jardin de Paris, and there he lost her in the mad mob that was making merry about the band-stand.
The place was thronged with people who were shouting and laughing and racing about the asphalt pavement. Handsome women, gorgeously gowned and bedecked with diamonds, had joined hands with swells in evening dress and they were sweeping through the crowd, yelling boisterously. The French swells had cut down the Chinese lanterns with their sticks, removed the dripping candles, and stuck them on the tops of their silk hats with the burning tallow, thus making living torches of themselves.
Now, for the first time, Frank fully realized what was meant by the expression, “Gay Paris.” Never before had he seen anything like this. Past him raced a youth in evening dress, dripping with candle grease, holding by the hand a beautiful girl in a dinner gown, with her silk and velvet opera cloak slipping from her shoulders, both screaming with laughter.
A band of roysterers, with joined hands, were spinning around a stately dignitary, who could not escape from the circle. Another party was storming the women who were running the shooting gallery. A girl in a linen blouse and flat straw hat was dancing vis-a-vis with another girl who wore diamonds in ropes, surrounded by admiring and applauding men.
“Great Scott!” gasped Frank, in a bewildered way. “What have I struck here! This lays over anything I have yet seen in this rather lively little town!”
The merrymaking spirit was catching. Frank forgot the strange woman of the masked face, and he longed to join in the rushing, the shouting, the waltzing and the singing. His warm boyish blood was tingling in his veins.