She walked along the crowded pavement, strolling quietly all the while,
with a keen eye on the shop windows and careless of the homage lavished
on her beauty. Strolling thus, she came to the Place de La Madeleine,
and by way of the Rue Royale, reached the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and
entered the Grand Hotel Concordia. The lady-killer stopped, walked on
about fifty yards, bought a packet of cigarettes, came back, entered
the hotel. Three minutes later he came out and went off; and just as
Ralph was about to question the clerk about the English girl, she
herself came out of the hall and entered a car to which a servant had
carried a small trunk. Was she then off on her travels?
Ralph hailed a taxi and said to the driver: “Follow that car.”
The English girl did some shopping and at eight o’clock stopped at the
Paris-Lyon Station; there she went into the refreshment room and
ordered dinner.
Ralph dined at a distant table.
When she had finished her dinner she smoked a couple of cigarettes and
then she made her way to the 9.46 express.
Ralph considered for a few moments, then made up his mind. Those blue
eyes were certainly worth a journey. Moreover it was in following those
blue eyes that he had made the acquaintance of the green eyes; and it
might be that by way of the English girl he might find the lady-killer
and by way of the lady-killer come to the green eyes again.
He turned quickly and bought a ticket to Monte Carlo and hurried to the
platform.
He saw the English girl step into the third compartment of car No. 5,
slipped into the middle of a group and saw her, through the window,
taking off her cloak.
There were but few passengers. It was some years before the war, the
end of April, and this express, without sleeping or restaurant car, was
too uncomfortable to carry more than a few first-class passengers to
the South. Ralph indeed only saw two, both men, who were in the
compartment just in front of the one occupied by the English girl in
car No. 5.
He strolled up and down the platform some distance from the car, hired
two pillows, provided himself with a traveling library of papers and
magazines, and when the whistle blew jumped on to the step, opened the
door, and entered the third compartment of car No. 5 in the manner of a
man who has caught the train by the skin of his teeth.
The English girl was alone in the corner by the window facing the
engine; Ralph settled down, with his back to the engine, in the corner
next to the corridor. She raised her eyes and glanced at the intruder,
carelessly enough, and went on eating chocolates from the box open on
her knee.
A conductor walked down the corridor and punched their tickets. The
train rushed towards the outskirts; and the lights of Paris grew
farther and farther between. Ralph ran his eye listlessly over the
evening papers and since he found nothing to interest him in them, cast
them aside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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