"Very well, then: if you don't know of anything better, let's hunt up this incognita. If she went to the Français, she's most likely at the Odéon to-night," said De Concressault. "Shall we try?"
"Allons!" said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. "But it's rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet enough in Paris without one's setting off on a wild-goose chase after them."
They were playing the last act of "La Calomnie," as Vaughan and De Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked round the house. He swore a few mental "Diables!" and "Sacrés!" as his gaze fell on faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but what he wanted. At last, without moving his glass, he touched De Concressault's arm.
"There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera cloak, with pink flowers in her hair."
"I see her, mon ami," said Emile. "I found her out two seconds ago (see how well you sketch!) but I wouldn't spoil your pleasure in discovering her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she's looking at you, and smiles as if she recognised you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzun?"
Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the girl's expression that she knew the saviour of her bouquet again, for though he was accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him at such short notice was something new to him.
He didn't take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth the honor, with her soft, lustrous gold hair, the eyes that defy definition—black in some lights, violet in others—a wide-arched forehead, promising plenty of brains, and a rayonnante, animated, joyous expression, quite refreshing to anybody as bored and blasé as Vaughan and De Concressault. As soon as the last piece was over Vaughan slipped out of his loge, and took up his station at the entrance.
He didn't wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a gentleman—middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of satisfaction. She glanced up at him as she passed: he looked very handsome in the gas glare. Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to think of his pose, but even we have our weaknesses under certain circumstances, as well as the crinolines. Luckily for him, he chanced to have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he had bought that morning for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, and held it out to her.
"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," he said in French, "but I think you dropped this?"
She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a pure accent, "No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me."