De Chauxville laughed again in an unemotional way.
“You alter little,” he said. “Your plainness of speech takes me back to Petersburg. Yes, I admit that Mrs. Sydney Bamborough rather interested me. But I assume too much; that is no reason why she should interest you.”
“She does not, my good friend, but you do. I am all attention.”
“Do you know anything of her?” asked De Chauxville perfunctorily, not as a man who expects an answer or intends to believe that which he may be about to hear.
“Nothing.”
“You are likely to know more?”
Karl Steinmetz shrugged his heavy shoulders, and shook his head doubtfully.
“I am not a lady’s man,” he added gruffly; “the good God has not shaped me that way. I am too d—d fat. Has Mrs. Sydney Bamborough fallen in love with me? Has some imprudent person shown her my photograph? I hope not. Heaven forbid!”
He puffed steadily at his pipe, and glanced quickly at De Chauxville through the smoke.
“No,” answered the Frenchman quite gravely. Frenchmen, by the way, do not admit that one may be too middle-aged, or too stout, for love. “But she is au mieux with the prince.”