When the dish came, neither Paul nor Miss Brooke liked the curly look of it, so they fell back on bifteck, salad, cheese, and fruit.
"And so you are here after all," said Miss Brooke, musingly.
"Why? Did you think I was not serious about coming?"
"I didn't mean that. My expression was a sort of acknowledgment to myself that I had found you—or rather, to be proper, that you had found me."
His heart fairly leaped with pleasure. She had certainly then thought of him during the past months!
"I must thank the happy chance that led you in here," he murmured, feeling his emotion at length control him.
"Happy chance!" She charmed his ear with a ripple of laughter. "Why, I've exhausted almost every restaurant near the Beaux Arts, that being the most feminine way of pursuing you. The mathematical theory of probability—college learning does prove useful at times—told me the happening of the event, that is, of the event I wanted to happen, was a certainty. For some particular restaurant or other is a habit which everybody contracts; it is, indeed, the first vice one picks up in Paris. And it's a habit that can't be broken. Day after day you revolt—if you're a man, you swear—against the cuisine. Things are becoming intolerable. Time was when everything was perfect, when the menu was varied, and always included your favourite dishes; when one could eat the salad without too close an inspection of the under-side of the leaves, and when the wine at eighty centimes a litre didn't turn blue or taste like ink. To-day is, most certainly, the last time you will ever set foot in the place. But the morrow comes, and at déjeuner time your feet bear you there again, and you are so meek about it that you scarcely protest."
"That is just my experience," he confessed.
"I was sure it would be. That is what enabled me to calculate so infallibly. You see I speak my thoughts quite unashamed. Paris makes one so frightfully immodest."
"I'm glad, then, I didn't take it into my head to apply the same method in my search for you. Not only would it have upset your mathematics, but, having no particular landmark, I might have wandered on forever. All the same, I have kept my eyes open. In fact, I was hoping to see you yesterday at vernissage."