"Oh, of course; when I used to sightsee. Have you never been to Paris before?"
"No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March."
"In March?" she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision, and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt. "Wasn't that a bad time to leave Wall Street?"
"Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change." Nothing in his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to develop it. "I presume you're settled here now?" he went on. "I saw by the papers—"
"Yes," she interrupted; adding, after a moment: "It was all a mistake from the first."
"Well, I never thought he was your form," said Moffatt.
His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed his attention.
"I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with me?" she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs, and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some light on hers.
In the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man pleasantly aware of his privileges. "This Paris is a thundering good place," he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at Undine's door, and he stood in her drawing-room, and looked out on the horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his satisfaction culminated in the comment: "I guess this lays out West End Avenue!"
His eyes met Undine's with their old twinkle, and their expression encouraged her to murmur: "Of course there are times when I'm very lonely."