“How can I tell, monsieur? Paris is the gate to all the Continent!”
“Surely they left an address?”
The clerk looked up in a book. No, the ladies had not left any address. He condescended to send for the Hall Porter, a superb person in a claret-coloured uniform. The Hall Porter himself condescended to inform the rather shabby-looking Englishman that “Madame la Comtesse d’Ottery” and Miladi, her daughter, had departed by automobile to Amiens. He understood they proposed to visit the battlefields in the British war-zone.
Bertram could obtain no further information, and when he walked down the rue de Rivoli, the serenity of mind and exalted sense of sacrifice which he believed he had acquired during lonely nights and days, departed from him abruptly, for a few minutes at least, and he was furious with Fortune for having played him such a scurvy trick.
He had just come from Amiens. Joyce had just gone there! If he had only known that she wanted to visit the battlefields, he could have shown her every yard of earth that was hallowed by the struggle of British manhood—made her see with his eyes the way of battle, taken her to Ypres where her brothers had died, pointed out the line of old trenches beyond which he had once stared into No-Man’s Land, led her into the very dug-out where he had found her letter.
On such a journey they would have come together again, gone hand in hand and heart to heart, understanding the immensity of that tragedy of death which made their own lives in debt for ever to the youth that died. No such luck! By twenty-four hours he had missed Joyce, and this chance.
He had the idea of taking the first train back to Amiens, and tracing them from there, but he reflected that in an automobile they would be lost to him, and that his best chance of quickest meeting would be to await Joyce’s return to Paris. He would be able to find out her plans from Murless, at the British Embassy.
Bertram dumped his one bag in a small hotel in the rue St. Honoré—he couldn’t afford the Hotel Meurice—and walked to the Embassy in the Faubourg St. Honoré.
Kenneth Murless, to whom he sent in his card, kept him waiting for ten minutes, and in spite of that self-rebuke which had softened his feelings so recently towards Kenneth, this delay strained his temper and aroused his old sense of hostility, according to the natural law which makes all men hate those who keep them in antechambers, even as Dr. Johnson hated Lord Chesterfield and dipped his pen in venom to take vengeance.
The door opened, and light footsteps crossed the polished boards. Bertram turned and saw Kenneth Murless, and was aware that, for just the fraction of a second, Kenneth had a startled look, almost a look of fear. It passed instantly into a welcoming smile.