“I can’t tell you now, I have to buy things. Listen, child, will you give me lunch to-day? Naps is busy for lunch. Listen, you must give me lunch to-day. I hate Paris.” “But Napier told me you were going South to-day!” “Oh, Naps is mad!” A boyish voice, a very boyish voice Venice had, even on a telephone in Paris. “Not dangerously mad, but just mad. I never knew such a silly, one can’t ever arrange anything beforehand with him. We are going by the evening train now, though we had everything booked for the one this morning. Listen, are you going to give me lunch? Oh that’s a dear. About one, here at the Meurice....” “Venice!” I called, but she was gone, and I could see her striding intently through the sombre halls of the Meurice, lovely Venice, like sunlight, just like English sunlight. And keeping my mind to sunlight, and avoiding all thoughts of death and dark enchantment, I said to myself that I would stay in Paris now that I was in Paris, rather than return to London, for over London lay a memorable fog, so said the Continental _Daily Mail_, as also it said Hats Off To France, the guileless thing.... “_De la par du Docteur Mastaire_,” said the telephone this time, and there was that captain of men muttering, as he had promised he would in return for my playing bridge till all hours for his sake, that there was little change in Iris, but what little was for the better rather than for the worse. “But don’t go thinking,” said he sharply enough, “that she’s nearly out of the wood yet, because she isn’t. And, by the way, she seems to want to see you, but remember that you’ll do her the worst turn you can if you let that boy leave Paris to-day.” “Yes, but,” I said, but I spoke only to the roar of the Parisian scene, and I thought: “Oh, well! He isn’t going till the evening anyhow.” And, still keeping my mind from dwelling on death and dark enchantments, I renewed my decision to stay in Paris a while, no matter how bitterly my sister might inveigh against me for letting her return to England unaccompanied. By now the rue de la Paix was languishing brilliantly in the stormy sunlight, and from my bath I could glimpse the cars lounging up and down and women walking swiftly by, intent on errands of the greatest importance and looking as attractive as only women can look when they are not thinking of men, while Englishmen and Americans walked seriously toward the chairs on the boulevards that they had read about in Nash’s Magazine. Then my sister’s car passed by towards the Place de l’Opera, and she sitting forward with an air of moment, the ferrule of her parasol poised above the shoulder of the chauffeur, poor Mr. Hebblethwaite, who hated the French so! “I will tell her,” I said, “that I am regrettably detained in Paris owing to the call of my art, my Work, for I have just thought of a tale about a man who would not dance with his wife, and would you have me, I will put to her frankly, write a tale like that in a London fog?”