“Au revoir, m’sieur, till twelve, at the Rue Royale,” she exclaimed, with a merry smile and a bow, as she drove away in a cab, leaving me upon the kerb gazing after her and wondering.
Was she really a governess, as she pretended?
Her clothes, her manner, her smart chatter, her exquisite chic, all revealed good breeding and a high station in life. There was no touch of cheap shabbiness—or at least I could not detect it.
A few moments before twelve she alighted from the cab at the corner of the Rue Royale and greeted me merrily. Her face was slightly flushed, and I thought her hand trembled as I took it. But together we mounted into the car again.
“You seem a constant traveller on the road, m’sieur,” she said, as we went along.
“I’m a constant traveller,” I replied, with a laugh. “A little too constant, perhaps. One gets wearied with such continual travel as I am forced to undertake. I never know to-morrow where I may be, and I move swiftly from one place to another, never spending more than a day or two in the same place.”
I did not, for obvious reasons, tell her my profession.
“But it must be very pleasant to travel so much,” she declared. “I would love to be able to do so. I’m passionately fond of constant change.”
Together we went on to Boulogne, crossed to Folkestone, and that same night at midnight entered London.