“But your instructions!” I pointed out. “Whereas, if I may say so, you have so far been so ‘nice’ to me that I have lost five hundred francs at bridge on your behalf.” That is what I was driven to saying, but I doubt if he heard me, the telephones of Paris being very well adapted for selective hearing, for all he said was that he was due at the Boulevard Pierre Abel in half an hour, and he would pick me up on the way if I liked. If I liked! As though, Heavens above, there was one single thing in all this wretched business about which one might say, with any hope of being attended to, “If I liked, this,” or “If I liked, that....” CHAPTER EIGHT: PIQURE DU CŒUR I Twilight was spreading her cloak as we passed from the lodge into the flagged yard. Several windows of the tall red building were already alight, and on the sill outside the largest window of all, which was not alight, stood a pineapple and some grapes on a plate. Within, the feet fell chill on the chequered flags of the hall; and this, by its size, should have been a spacious-seeming hall, but that was not the way it impressed one. There was one of those bamboo hat-stands with a strip of looking-glass running up the middle of it, but I followed my companion’s example in not leaving more than my hat, for that was a chilly place. Through a great oaken double-door on our right came murmurings of a religious nature and every now and then a woman’s manlike voice raised, no doubt, in exhortation. Conrad Masters explained that some of the nuns would be at their devotions whenever they could manage, their religious observances being so deranged by night-duty and this and the other. “But why,” I thought to ask, “is Mrs. Storm here, for don’t you as a rule immure your patients in the Avenue Malakoff?” “She wished it,” said Conrad Masters sharply. “She has a God.” And thereupon he left me, to see another patient he had there, but I had not waited more than a few minutes in the waiting-room, which had that intangible odour of old cloth and illness, when I was called upstairs by an old stern nun, hard and silent as a rock, and I remember wondering: “Good my God, if this should be Iris’s day-nurse. Oh, poor Iris!” The stairway we ascended was handsome and wide, of polished oak, the most dignified stairway you could well imagine in a nursing-home. It swept in a noble curve to a broad passage, also of oak, as, no doubt, was only fit and proper in a nursing-home patronised by _une clientèle européenne la plus chic_. But maybe it was a little too dignified, I thought, it was sombre; and the old stern nun who was my guide did not seek to relieve the atmosphere, giving me a massive black shoulder and to my question no more than a stern whisper which was no more and no less than a shout of disapproval: “_Assez bien, monsieur, assez bien. Nous nous confions en Dieu._”