At a narrow street-corner, in the grateful shade cast by some tall houses, I come face to face with him again.
"Did not you wonder where I had disappeared to?" he asks; "or perhaps you never noticed that I had?"
He is panting a little, as if he had been running, or walking fast.
"I thought that most likely you had taken offense again," reply I, with a laugh, "and that I had lost sight of you for three more days."
"I have been to the Hôtel de Saxe," he replies, with a rather triumphant smile on his handsome mustacheless lips. "I thought I would find out about Loschwitz."
"Find out what?" cry I, standing still, raising my voice a little, and growing even redder than the sun, the flies, the brown-paper parcel, and the heavy umbrella, have already made me. "There was nothing to find out! I wish you would leave things alone; I wish you would let me manage my own business."
The smile disappears rather rapidly.
"You have not been telling the general," continue I, in a tone of rapid apprehension, "that I did not want to go with him? because, if you have, it was a great, great mistake."
"I told him nothing of the kind," replies Mr. Musgrave, looking, like me, fierce, but—unlike me—cool and pale. "I was not so inventive. I merely suggested that sunstroke would most likely be your portion if you went now, and that it would be quite as easy, and a great deal pleasanter, to go three hours later."
"Yes? and he said—what?"