George Vane stammered out an apology. His daughter had returned from school, he said, and he wished to show her Paris.
“Yes, yes,” the Frenchman answered; “but we were aware of Mademoiselle’s intended return, and it was arranged in spite of that that we should meet this evening: was it not so, my friend?”
He asked this question of his companion, who nodded rather sulkily, and turned away with a half weary, half dissatisfied air.
Eleanor looked at the two young men, wondering what new friends her father had made in Paris. The Frenchman was short and stout, and had a fair florid complexion. Eleanor was able to see this, for his face was turned to the lamplight, as he talked to her father. He was rather showily dressed, in fashionably cut clothes, that looked glossy and new, and he twirled a short silver-headed cane in his gloved hands.
The other man was tall and slender, shabbily and untidily dressed in garments of a rakish cut, that hung loosely about him. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his loose overcoat, and his hat was slouched over his forehead.
Eleanor Vane only caught one passing glimpse of this man’s face as he turned sulkily away; but she could see the glimmer of a pair of bright, restless, black eyes under the shadow of his hat, and the fierce curve of a very thick black moustache, which completely concealed his mouth. He had turned, not towards the lighted shop windows, but to the roadway; and he was amusing himself by kicking a wisp of straw to and fro upon the sharp edge of the curb-stone, with the toe of his shabby patent leather boot.
The Frenchman drew George Vane aside, and talked to him for a few minutes in an undertone, gesticulating after the manner of his nation, and evidently persuading the old man to do something or other which he shrank from doing. But Mr. Vane’s resistance seemed of a very feeble nature, and the Frenchman conquered, for his last shrug was one of triumph. Eleanor, standing by herself, midway between the sulky young man upon the curb-stone and her father and the Frenchman, perceived this. She looked up anxiously as Mr. Vane returned to her.
“My love,” the old man said, hesitatingly, nervously trifling with his glove as he spoke, “do you think you could find your way back to the Rue de l’Archevêque?”
“Find my way back? Why, papa?”
“I—I mean, could you find your way back a—alone?”