The waiting-room into which they were shown was a gloomy apartment looking on to an inner courtyard, and Senator Burton's card did not produce the magic effect it had done at the American Consulate; in fact he and his companion had to take their turn with a crowd of other people, and the time they were kept waiting seemed very long.
At last, however, they were ushered into the study of the courteous Briton whose difficult and sometimes exasperating duty it is to look after the rights and interests of the motley world composed of those Englishmen and Englishwomen who make a short or long sojourn in Paris. Once they were in his presence nothing could have been kinder and more considerate than the British Consul's reception of the American Senator and his companion.
In the Consular branch of the Diplomatic Service the post of Consul in the greater cities of the civilised world is almost invariably given to an ex-member of the Diplomatic Corps—to one, that is, who is a shrewd man of the world rather than a trained business official, and Senator Burton felt it to be a comfort indeed to deal with such a one rather than with an acute but probably conventionally-minded man of commercial experience.
The Consul was moved by Mrs. Dampier's youth, her beauty, her evident, if subdued bewilderment and distress. She told her story very clearly and simply, but to the Senator's excited and yes, it must be admitted, suspicious fancy, she seemed to slur over, as of no importance, the extraordinary discrepancy between her own and the Poulains' account of what had happened on the night of her own and her husband's arrival in Paris.
The Consul asked but few questions, but those were pertinent and to the point.
"I am glad, Mrs. Dampier, that you did not come to me yesterday," he said at last, "for, thanks, as I understand, to this gentleman, you have done everything which I should have had to advise you to do."
He then turned more particularly to his American visitor:—"I suppose you have now quite convinced yourself that no kind of street accident befell Mr. Dampier yesterday morning?"
The Senator shook his head dubiously; there was a look of hesitation, of unease, on his face.
"Perhaps it would be as well," said the Consul suavely, "for Mrs. Dampier to go and wait awhile in the next room. Then you and I, Mr. Senator, might go into the matter more thoroughly?"
Unsuspiciously Nancy Dampier fell in with the plan.