He loosed his grip. The liberated lady-killer turned and ran. But the taxi had gathered speed and was bearing away his adversary and the girl with the green eyes, at a pace that made it quite plain that the most strenuous effort on his part to catch them would prove vain.
“And a lot forwarder I’ve got,” said Ralph watching [[18]]him run. “I play the Don Quixote to a lovely unknown; and she rushes off without giving me her name and address! There isn’t a chance of finding her. Well?”
Well, he decided to return to the English girl. She also was withdrawing, having doubtless been a witness of the row. He followed her.
He found himself at one of those periods at which life is in a way suspended between the past and the future. When one is thirty years old, it is woman who appears to us to hold in her hands the key of our destiny. Since the green eyes had vanished he would guide his wavering steps by the light of the blue.
Then, almost immediately, having pretended to set out in the opposite direction and returned on his steps, he perceived that the pomaded lady-killer had betaken himself once more to the chase, and, rebuffed in one quarter had turned, like himself, to the other. And all three of them resumed their stroll without the English girl perceiving the maneuvers of her followers.
She walked along the crowded pavement, strolling quietly all the while, with a keen eye on the shop windows and careless of the homage lavished on her beauty. Strolling thus, she came to the Place de La Madeleine, and by way of the Rue Royale, reached the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and entered the Grand Hotel Concordia. The lady-killer stopped, walked on about fifty yards, bought a packet of cigarettes, came back, entered the [[19]]hotel. Three minutes later he came out and went off; and just as Ralph was about to question the clerk about the English girl, she herself came out of the hall and entered a car to which a servant had carried a small trunk. Was she then off on her travels?
Ralph hailed a taxi and said to the driver: “Follow that car.”
The English girl did some shopping and at eight o’clock stopped at the Paris-Lyon Station; there she went into the refreshment room and ordered dinner.
Ralph dined at a distant table.
When she had finished her dinner she smoked a couple of cigarettes and then she made her way to the 9.46 express.