"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves--at once--at once! Call a cab." Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her, bending to her ear. "We must walk," he said. "It is not so far--if you are not too tired?" "No, no, I'm not too tired--or I won't be if we can only hurry." They started slowly, by necessity, on their way. "But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are afraid--of me?" His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes. "Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't----" "Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this morning." "_Not afraid_--even then. And now--well, I remember the talk we had afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it." Again his lips were near her neck. "I shall never forget it," he vowed. Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed. She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel. "Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met. The servant thought not. "Ask at the _bureau_." Stainton had not yet come back. "He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room." Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors--perhaps the greatest--that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her. She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.