There was something queer about him, I thought, as he crossed the courtyard; just as there was about the house, I appended doggedly, with growing belief. His air was tremulous, his step slow, his gaze far-off and anxious.
“For Miss Falconer, who waits for me,” I announced in French, offering him my card through the grille.
He bowed to me with the deference of a Latin, the grand manner of an ambassador; but he made no motion to let me in.
“Mademoiselle,” he replied, “sends all her excuses, all her regrets to monsieur, but she leaves Paris within the hour and, therefore may not receive.”
I had feared it for a good sixty seconds. None the less, it was a blow to me. My suspicions, never more than half laid, promptly raised their heads again.
“Have the kindness,” I requested, with a calm air of command that I had known to prove hypnotic, “to convey my card to mademoiselle, and to say that I beg of her, before her departure, one little instant of speech.”
But the old fellow’s faded blue eyes were gazing past me, hopelessly sad, supremely mournful. What the deuce ailed him? I wondered angrily. The thing was almost weird. Of a sudden, with irritation, yet with dread, too, I felt myself on the threshold of a house of tragedy. The man might, from the look of him, have been watching some loved young master’s bier.
“Mademoiselle regrets greatly,” he intoned, “but she may not receive. Mademoiselle sends this letter to monsieur that he may understand.” He passed me, through the locked grille, a slender missive; then he saluted me once more and, still staring before him with that fixed, uncanny look, withdrew.