"I know; but now it will be spring there--real spring--and everyone says that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris." "Yet the climate----" "It will suit me in the spring; I know it will." "Do you think"--Stainton put his hand upon hers--"do you think that you can rest there: really rest?" "I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful. I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German, either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been hurrying--hurrying--hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?" "I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked sixty years old. "I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know _what's_ the matter with me; but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back home." This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more quartered at the Chatham. XV "NOT AT HOME" "A gentleman to see madame." The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up" at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris, there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of Captain von Klausen. "I am not at home," said Muriel. "Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added: "This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed disappointed." "I am not at home," repeated Muriel. This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the sitting-room again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen downstairs and had brought him along. In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it. Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.