Again his lips were near her neck.
"I shall never forget it," he vowed.
Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed. She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel.
"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met.
The servant thought not.
"Ask at the bureau."
Stainton had not yet come back.
"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room."
Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors—perhaps the greatest—that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her. She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.
"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my—in the sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."