Her burly little clock struck four. Hurrying on reform-clothes, she went out to buy lunch. The dairy lay nearly next door to Lejeune’s restaurant. Crossing the road towards it, she caught sight of Kreisler’s steadily marching figure approaching. First she side-stepped and half turned. But the shop would be reached before they met, so she went on, merely quickening her pace. Her eye, covertly fixed on him, calculating distances and speeds, saw him hesitate—evidently having just caught sight of _her_—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy she was making for. Unwise pique beset her at this. CHAPTER V Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot he had started from, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was that, as she left the shop, there was Kreisler approaching again, almost in the same place as before. She was greeted affably, as though to say “Caught! both of us!” He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him. He was so accustomed to think of her in that character! If she had been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him. She was a woman who could not help adhering. “How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.” “So late?” “I thought you’d left Paris!” She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for _not_ leaving Paris. “I? Who told you that, I should like to know. I shall never leave Paris; at least⸺” There was heavy enigmatic meaning in this, said lightly. It did not escape her, sensible to such nuances. “How are our fair friends?” he asked. “Our? Oh, Fräulein Lipmann and—Oh, I haven’t seen them since the other night.” “Indeed! Not since the other night⸺?” She made her silence swarm with significant meanings, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes even, stared and darted about, glassily. It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away. The part she had more or less played with her friends, of his champion, had imposed itself on her. She could not leave her protégé without something further said. She was flattered, too, at his showing no signs now of desire to escape. His more plainly brutal instincts woke readily in these vague days. Various appetites had been asserting themselves. So the fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject. He felt so modest now, ideals things of the past. Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distinctions were suitable?