He remained dumb, smiling up at her with appealing pathos from time to time. She wondered if he had indigestion or what. He made several desperate dog-like sorties. But she saw he was clearly in difficulties—As her lunch was finished, she called the waitress.—Her bill was made out, Kreisler scowling at her all the while. Her attitude, suggesting, “Yes, you _are_ funny, you know you are. I’d better go, then you’ll be better,” was responded to by him with the same offended dignity as the drunken man displays when his unsteadiness is observed. He repudiated sulkily the suggestion that there was anything wrong. Then he grew angry with her. His nervousness was her doing.—All was lost. He was very near some violence.—But when she stood up, he was so impressed that he sat gaping after her. He remained cramped in his place until she had left the restaurant. He moved in his chair stiffly; he ached as though he had been sitting for his portrait. The analogy struck him. Had he been sitting for his portrait? These people dining near him as though they had suddenly appeared out of the ground—he was embarrassed at finding himself alone with them. They knew all that had happened, but were pretending not to. He had not noticed that they were there all round him, overbearing and looking on. It was as though he had been talking to himself, and had just become aware of it. A tide of magnetism had flowed away, leaving him bare and stranded.—He cursed his stupidity. He then stopped this empty mental racket abruptly.—Only a few minutes had passed since Anastasya’s departure. He seized hat and stick and hurried up to the desk.—Once outside he gave his glasses an adjusting pull, gazed up and down the boulevard in all directions. No sign of the tall figure he was pursuing. He started off, partly at a run, in the likeliest direction.—At the Café Berne corner, where several new vistas opened, there she was, some way down the Boulevard du Paradis, on the edge of the side-walk, waiting till a tram had passed to cross. Having seen so much, should he not go back? For there was nothing else to be done. To catch her up and force himself on her could have only one result, he thought. He might, perhaps, follow a little way. That was being done already. They went on for some hundred yards, she a good distance ahead on the other side of the boulevard. Walking for a moment, his eyes on the ground, he looked up and caught her head pivoting slowly round. She no doubt had seen him.—With shame he realized what was happening.—“Here I am following this girl as though we were strangers! This is what I began in the restaurant. I am putting the final touch by following her in the street, as though we had never spoken!” Either he must catch her up at once or vanish. He promptly turned up a side street, and circled round to his starting-point. CHAPTER VI