"Do as you like, of course. At the same time, let me tell you that you irritate me. Keep out of my sight as much as possible. It will be better for you."
Julien turned and left him there, declared his luggage, and was driven to a quiet hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. There he had a bath, changed his clothes, and strolled up the Champs Élysées towards the Bois. The sun had come out and the avenue was crowded with automobiles and carriages. He walked steadily on until he reached the first of the cafés in the Bois. He took a chair and watched the crowd. A peculiar sensation of loneliness oppressed him, a loneliness of which he had been scarcely conscious during this last month's wanderings among the quiet places. Paris had seemed so different to him on his last visit. He was surrounded by friends and people who were anxious to become his friends. He was in charge of a difficult mission which he was conscious of conducting with skill. Everywhere he was meeting English people of his own order, all delighted to see him, all pleased with his notice. His few days in Paris were merely a change in the kaleidoscope from London. The life—everything else—was the same. This time he was like a man cast upon a desert island. He sat at his little table, sipping a glass of vermouth, and conscious that no man in Paris had fewer friends. The clubs were closed to him, there were no official visits to pay, no calls to make, no familiar faces to look for. He was a man who had had his day, a man disgraced, a man in whom the people had lost faith, who was dead politically and socially. He thought his position over carefully from every point of view. It was ruin, utter and complete. He had disclosed a valuable political secret to a woman who had not hesitated to make use of it. Nothing could be more ignoble. He tried to fancy for himself some new life under altered conditions, but everywhere he seemed to run up against some possibility, some combination of circumstances which included a share in things which were absolutely finished. His brain refused to fashion for him the thought of any life which could leave outside everything which had been of account to him up till now. Even in London, among the working classes, it might have been easier. He remembered those few vivid speeches of Kendricks'. What a gift the man had! Always he seemed to see big things in life smouldering underneath the lives of these ordinary people—big things unsuspected, invisible. There was nothing of the sort to be found here. The only Paris Julien had ever known was closed to him. Paris the vicious repelled him instinctively. He was here, he had even looked forward to coming, but now that he had arrived there was nothing for him to do. After all, he had better have found some far distant corner in Switzerland or Italy. There was no club for him to go to, no interest in perusing the newspapers, no visits from ambassadors to think about. The puzzles of his daily life were ended. There was nothing for him to do where he was but to eat and to drink and to sleep!
He lunched at a restaurant of which he had never heard before, and there, to his anger, almost at the next table, he found Foster. With a trace of his former imperiousness of manner, he summoned him. The young man rose, after a moment's hesitation, and obeyed the mandate.
"What are you doing here?" Julien demanded.
"Lunching, sir," the young man replied. "The place has been recommended to me. I do not know Paris well."
"You lie," Julien declared. "Unless you knew Paris well, you wouldn't be here for Number 3 Branch. Tell me, are you still watching me?"
"That is a question, Sir Julien, which, as I said before, I am not at liberty to answer."
Julien drew a little breath between his teeth.
"Look here," he continued, "I want to warn you that I am a bad-tempered man. You can write home if you like and tell them that you met me coming out of the German Embassy and the Russian Embassy and the Italian Embassy, with a list of prices in my hands for different pieces of information. Is that what you're afraid of, eh?"
"Sir Julien," the young man answered, "I have to make reports only. It is not my business to question the necessity for them."