“It is charming, as you say, Mr. Reginald Westcar.”
“You know me?” I exclaim, in astonishment.
“Pardon me, I can scarcely claim a personal acquaintance. But yours is the only English name entered to-day in the Livre des Étrangers.”
“You are staying at the Hôtel de la Concorde, then?”
An inclination of the head is all the answer vouchsafed.
“May I ask,” I continue, “whether you heard just now a very strange cry repeated three times?”
A pause. The lustrous eyes seem to search me through and through—I can hardly bear their gaze. Then he replies.
“I fancy I heard the echoes of some such sounds as you describe.”
The echoes! Is this, then, the man who gave utterance to those cries of woe! is it possible? The face seems so passionless; but the pallor of those features bears witness to some terrible agony within.
“I thought some one must be in distress,” I rejoin, hastily; “and I hurried back to see if I could be of any service.”