“So badly hit as that, Bertie?”
“Pshaw!” cried the doctor, turning on his heel.
And they did not find her. Not a bit of it. Bertram walked, and stalked, and darted hither and thither, until Kirwan fairly let him have his own way, giving him a rendezvous at the hotel for seven o’clock.
What cared Bertram Martin for the gorgeous array of foreign princes, ambassadors, commissioners, presidents, ministers, deputations, senators, or deputies? What cared he for the address to Marshal MacMahon, or the one-hundred-and-one gun salute, or the military music, or the hoisting of flags, or the playing of fountains? What cared he for the procession, with all its glittering magnificence, or for all the treasures of the earth dug up by man and nurtured by art? He sought the four-leaved shamrock in the bright young girl whose beauty had flashed upon him as a revelation, and although he posted himself at the chief exit until he came to be regarded with suspicion by a grim sergent-de-ville, in the hope of obtaining another glimpse of her, he was doomed to disappointment, and he returned to the hotel, and to a petit dîner ordered for the occasion by his uncle, in the worst possible spirits.
“Did you find her, Bertie?”
“No.”
“If she’s French she won’t go to the Exhibition again for some time. She has done the opening, and will take it now, as the Crushed Tragedian says, ‘in sections.’ But come, Bertie, love or no love, try this Soupe à la Bonne Femme; it will ring up the curtain to a menu that even Delmonico never dreamt of in his wildest imaginings.”
For the two weeks that Bertie remained in Paris he sought the fair unknown—sought her in the Exposition, in the galleries of the Louvre, at Versailles, amongst the ruins of the palace of St. Cloud, in churches, on the boulevards, in cafés—everywhere. Once he thought he caught a glimpse of her passing along the Rue de Rome, and, plunging from the top of the omnibus at the imminent risk of breaking his neck, came up with a very pretty young girl who turned into the residence of the ex-Queen of Spain.
“It is a perfect infatuation,” wrote home Kirwan. “Bertie is crazed about some girl he saw on the opening day of the Exhibition. I can get no good of him. I scarcely ever see him, and when he is with me he is continually darting from me in pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, or craning his neck in search of her. And only to think of grave Doctor Bertram Martin being in this horrid state!”