It was Ralph who had thus risen before him; and he said in harsh accents: “Could you oblige me with a light?” A truly inopportune request. What was this interloper up to? The pomaded one bristled. “Clear off! I haven’t any matches!” he snapped. “But you have. A minute ago you were smoking,” the interloper asserted. Beside himself, the lady-killer tried to thrust him away. Not succeeding in doing so and being unable even to move his arms, he looked down to see what was paralyzing them. He appeared thunderstruck. The two hands of the interloper gripped his hands in such a manner that it was impossible to move them. An iron band could not have paralyzed them more thoroughly. And the interloper did not cease to repeat in obstinate, worrying accents: “Please oblige me with a light. It would be most unfortunate if you were to refuse me a light.” The group that had gathered round them began to laugh. The exasperated lady-killer snarled: “Will you leave me alone? I tell you I haven’t got a light!” The interloper shrugged his shoulders with a melancholy air. “Most uncivil, I call it,” he said mournfully. “I never heard of any one refusing a light when he was asked for it politely. But since you make such a fuss about rendering me this slight service—” He loosed his grip. The liberated lady-killer turned and ran. But the taxi had gathered speed and was bearing away his adversary and the girl with the green eyes, at a pace that made it quite plain that the most strenuous effort on his part to catch them would prove vain. “And a lot forwarder I’ve got,” said Ralph watching him run. “I play the Don Quixote to a lovely unknown; and she rushes off without giving me her name and address! There isn’t a chance of finding her. Well?” Well, he decided to return to the English girl. She also was withdrawing, having doubtless been a witness of the row. He followed her. He found himself at one of those periods at which life is in a way suspended between the past and the future. When one is thirty years old, it is woman who appears to us to hold in her hands the key of our destiny. Since the green eyes had vanished he would guide his wavering steps by the light of the blue. Then, almost immediately, having pretended to set out in the opposite direction and returned on his steps, he perceived that the pomaded lady-killer had betaken himself once more to the chase, and, rebuffed in one quarter had turned, like himself, to the other. And all three of them resumed their stroll without the English girl perceiving the maneuvers of her followers.