Timothy read the slip and chuckled.
“Is it likely?” he asked the page who brought the message.
Then he remembered the girl in grey, with the dark eyes, and he fingered his smooth chin thoughtfully.
“I wonder if it is worth while taking a chance,” he said to himself, and decided that, for the moment, it was not.
CHAPTER X
LADY MAXELL yawned and put down the magazine she was reading. She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. At such an hour Paris would be beginning to wake up. The best people would still be in the midst of their dinner, and Marie de Montdidier (born Hopkins) would be putting the final dabs of powder on her nose in her dressing-room at the Folies Bergères before making her first and her final appearance.
The boulevards would be bright with light, and there would be lines of twinkling autos in the Bois for the late diners at the Aromonville. She looked across at the girl sitting under a big lamp in a window recess, a book on her knees, but her mind and eyes elsewhere.
“Mary,” she said, and the girl, with a start, woke from her reverie.
“Do you want me, Lady Maxell?”
“What is the matter with Sir John? You know him better than I do.”