"I shall have him take you in to dinner, my dear," she continued. "He is most charming company when he wishes to be, I assure you." "Oh, Countess, no!" the young woman cried. "Let some one else have your wonderful Englishman. Good old Baron Lancret will amuse me sufficiently, my dear." "Ah, but no. The dear soul has grown quite deaf since you last saw him. I can not think of allowing it. Be a good child now. This is no plot. Sir Paul is an incurable misogynist--the only man I know who would not fall in love with you. See! your old friend is doing her best to provide you with an ideal dinner-partner. What more could you wish? It is settled." And a servant was promptly dispatched to the _Hotel du Rhin_. * * * * * "Do the Count and myself the favor to dine with us this evening," Paul read when he opened the note. "You will not have forgotten your old friends of a half-dozen years ago? We shall be charmed to see you again--and I shall expect you without fail." Well, he had no engagement for that night--and Paul sent back a polite note of acceptance. He remembered many pleasant functions that he had attended in years past at the Dalmatian Embassy in London. After all, he had to do something. He could not go about searching for the vanished lady every moment of the day and night. That much distraction, at least, he would allow himself. It was now eleven o'clock. He would wait until _dejeuner_ was over, and then he would go out somewhere--anywhere--so long as there were moving crowds of people to furnish some chance of his meeting her again. Next time, without fail, he would manage a conversation. That afternoon then he stepped out of the _hotel_ and engaged a _fiacre_--a taximeter would be of no use, Paul thought. Tearing through the streets at break-neck speed annihilated distance rather than time. He told the driver to take him anywhere he pleased, and leaned back listlessly as he was piloted slowly through the avenues. Paris, beautiful Paris, always intoxicated Paul. He had not cared for it when he was younger. But in those days he was less cosmopolitan than now. Our insular John Bull sees nothing outside our own tight little island. But to Paul an awakening had come. Since those wonderful weeks he had known in Switzerland and Venice--now long years ago--he had looked out upon the world with different eyes. The pulsating life of the streets quickened his own blood. "To the _Bois de Boulogne_!" he directed the _cocher_, finally, and soon they swung into the gay stream that flowed down the _Avenue du Bois de Boulogne_ toward the most wonderful pleasure ground in the world. CHAPTER XIV Paul found the _Bois_ as beautiful as ever, with its lakes and rippling streams hidden away in the forests. But he was conscious of a feeling of solitude as he rode along among the hundreds upon hundreds of jangling equipages.