For my part I found it very stupid. As I have said at least once in this history I am not what is called a “good mixer” and in an assemblage like this I was as out of place as a piece of ice on a hot stove. Worse than that, for the ice would have melted and I congealed the more. My bottle of champagne remained almost untouched and when a celluloid ball bounced on the top of my head I did not scream “Whoopee! Bullseye!” as my American neighbors did or “Voila! Touche!” like the French. There were plenty of Americans and English there, and they seemed to be having a good time, but their good time was incomprehensible to me. This was “gay Paris,” of course, but somehow the gaiety seemed forced and artificial and silly, except to the proprietors of L'Abbaye. If I had been getting the price for food and liquids which they received I might, perhaps, have been gay. The young Frenchman at my right was gay enough. He had early discovered my nationality and did his best to be entertaining. When a performer from the Olympia, the music hall on the Boulevard des Italiens, sang a distressing love ballad in a series of shrieks like those of a circular saw in a lumber mill, this person shouted his “Bravos” with the rest and then, waving his hands before my face, called for, “De cheer Americain! One, two, tree--Heep! Heep! Heep! Oo--ray-y-y!” I did not join in “the cheer Americain,” but I did burst out laughing, a proceeding which caused the young lady at my left to pat my arm and nod delighted approval. She evidently thought I was becoming gay and lighthearted at last. She was never more mistaken. It was nearly two o'clock and I had had quite enough of L'Abbaye. I had not enjoyed myself--had not expected to, so far as that went. I hope I am not a prig, and, whatever I am or am not, priggishness had no part in my feelings then. Under ordinary circumstances I should not have enjoyed myself in a place like that. Mine is not the temperament--I shouldn't know how. I must have appeared the most solemn ass in creation, and if I had come there with the idea of amusement, I should have felt like one. As it was, my feeling was not disgust, but unreasonable disappointment. Certainly I did not wish--now that I had seen L'Abbaye--to find Frances Morley there; but just as certainly I was disappointed. I called for my bill, paid it, and stood up. I gave one look about the crowded, noisy place, and then I started violently and sat down again. I had seen Herbert Bayliss. He had, apparently, just entered and a waiter was finding a seat for him at a table some distance away and on the opposite side of the great room. There was no doubt about it; it was he. My heart gave a bound that almost choked me and all sorts of possibilities surged through my brain. He had come to Paris to find her, he had found her--in our conversation he had intimated as much. And now, he was here at the “Abbey.” Why? Was it here that he had found her? Was she singing here after all?