Looking up from my empty plate, I declined politely; and we followed her signal to rise.
“There is a Mr. Kelly Eyre,” she said to Speed, “connected with your circus. Has he gone with the others?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“Really?” she mused, amiably. “I knew him as a student in Paris, when he was very young—and I was younger. I should have liked to have seen him—once more.”
“Did you not see him?” I asked, abruptly.
Her back was toward me; very deliberately she turned her pretty head and looked at me over her shoulder, studying my face a moment.
“Yes, I saw him. I should have liked to have seen him—once more,” she said, as though she had first calculated the effect on me of a different reply.
She led the way into that small room overlooking the garden where I had been twice received by Madame de Vassart. Here she took leave of us, 321 abandoning us to our own designs. Mine was to find a large arm-chair and sit down in it, and give Speed a few instructions. Speed’s was to prowl around Paradise for information, and, if possible, telegraph to Lorient for troops to catch Buckhurst red-handed.
He left me turning over the leaves of the “Chanson de Roland,” saying that he would return in a little while with any news he might pick up, and that he would do his best to catch Buckhurst in the foolish trap which that gentleman had set for others.
Tiring of the poem, I turned my eyes toward the garden, where, in the sunshine, heaps of crisped leaves lay drifted along the base of the wall or scattered between the rows of herbs which were still ripely green. The apricots had lost their leaves, so had the grapevines and the fig-trees; but the peach-trees were in foliage; pansies and perpetual roses bloomed amid sere and seedy thickets of larkspurs, phlox, and dead delphinium.