A tall, round-faced portier in green livery smiled and bowed, rather obsequiously he thought, as he passed out through the wide portal into the boulevard. Then the commingled scent of asphalt and macadam and burning charcoal—that characteristically Parisian odour—smote his olfactories, and before his eyes was the afternoon panorama of the gayest of Paris thoroughfares. It was the newspaper hour, and a kiosk in front of the hotel was being besieged by a horde, each hungry for his favourite journal. Every man that passed had a paper in his hand or in his pocket. Some were reading as they walked. On the roadway carriages, fiacres, omnibuses were crowding, and Grey noted, with a sense of old friends returned, the varnished hats of the cochers. The chairs under the awnings of the cafés were filling, and the white-aproned waiters were coming and going with their inevitable bustle of trays and glasses.
At the corner of the rue St. Anne he crossed to the north side of the boulevard and turned into the rue Taitbout, in which, he remembered, there was a telegraph office, for he meant to lose no time in despatching his cables. As he picked his way through the narrow street the messages took form, and on reaching the office it was but the labour of a moment to put them on paper, poke them in through the little window and pay the stipulated toll. To his mother he wired:
Safe and well. Sailing first steamer. Hôtel Grammont.
And the others—one addressed to Hope Van Tuyl, East Sixty-fourth street, New York, and one to “Malgrey,” the code name of the stock brokerage firm in which he was a junior partner—were similar.
Rejoining the throng of pedestrians on the boulevard, he sauntered leisurely towards the Avenue de l’Opéra, his mind still busy with conjectures.
The billboards in front of the Théâtre du Vaudeville caught his eye, but the attractions they announced made no impression. At the groups of idlers seated at little round tables before the Café Américain he scarcely glanced and his own unfamiliar reflection in the plate glass of the shop windows he failed utterly to recognise. He crossed the Place de l’Opéra without so much as turning his head, and halting at the far corner stepped in under the ample awning of the Café de la Paix and found a seat. Of the waiter who approached him he ordered a mazagran and some Egyptian cigarettes, and when they were brought he sat for some time, heedless of his surroundings, his brain racked with futile speculations.
“Pardon, monsieur!”
Someone in passing had inadvertently touched his foot and was apologising. Startled out of his reverie he looked up, and his face lighted. Instantly he was on his feet.
“Frothingham, by all that’s good!” he exclaimed.
The other, tall, straight and swarthy, turned upon him a look in which mystification and suspicion fought for supremacy.