Suppose the lady were somewhere in that wonderful throng of pleasure-seekers? In what fashion would she drive abroad?
"God knows," he muttered hoarsely to himself, "who or what she may be. Princess or lady's maid, I must find her."
So he rode on through the limitless Bois, that wonderful wilderness of green trees and country pleasures, of fêtes and promenades.
At last they turned into the Route de Suresnes, which soon led them to the Lac Supérieur. There Paul dismissed his cocher, for he had a fancy to stroll along the borders of the lake.
The banks were alive with boys and girls running about like young savages, to the distraction of their nurses. Paul threaded his way among them contentedly, for he loved children and had all too little opportunity to be with them. He stood for a time and watched with much amusement a game of blind-man's-buff—colin-maillard the little beggars called it, but if the name was different, the play was the same that Paul had known in his own boyhood at Verdayne Place.
Many fine ships were sailing along the lake's shore, navigated by brave mariners of eight and ten. Paul had just turned away from watching one spirited race when a scream arrested his attention. At first he saw only an excited group gathered at the lake's edge, and then his eye caught sight of a tell-tale hat, floating on the surface. With a few bounds he was in the water, to emerge soon with a little limp body in his arms. He laid his burden down gently on the pebbly bank and then gave place to a man who pushed his way through the crowd with the brisk professional air a doctor is wont to assume. In a few moments the sturdy enfant breathed again.
Paul felt anything but a hero. He had never been wetter—and moreover he had lost his hat. It would be a wonder, too, if any cocher would let him get into his carriage with the water running off him in rivulets.
He was standing by the road-side bargaining with one of that tribe and had nearly exhausted his stock of dignified French when he happened to glance over his shoulder as a carriage passed close by him. Beneath a parasol a lady's face stood out clearly from the moving maze around him—her face again.
The smile in her eyes made Paul mad.
He thrust a twenty-franc note into the hand of the astonished cocher, and springing into the cab directed the man to hurry on.