"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during the remainder of the afternoon——"
"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every minute. You are sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"
Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.
"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by motoring to Versailles and back."
So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odéon and dined on croûte consommé, filet of cod, and canard sauvage à la presse. After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.
When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as riotously happy as only a fête-day crowd in Paris can be.
Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton was lost.
They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away, Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts, he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.
Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the fête-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.
"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said—and, as he had to bend to her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a loose strand of her dark hair—"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."