Often, during these past eight or nine months, that scrawled writing would pass my mind, but as I could hit on no clue to her fantasies, and as I might never see her again, I had put Iris carefully away into that part of our minds wherein we keep fancies, images, regrets, the things that we will do one day, the things that we would like to do one day, the things that we will never do again ... when, but a moment ago, the great yellow car had leapt from the Place Vendôme into the first place in my mind, and I would like, I thought, to learn from my friend, Cherry-Marvel, anything that might be learnt about Iris. But as I listened to him, the way he had said this and had done that and had heard the other, I wondered how I would ever get the chance to suggest so much as her name to him. “..._à propos_ of something which I am positive that you, with your sort of mind....” We stood, for we had not yet had time to sit down, in the little reading-room of the Ritz that leads from the entrance-doors, while stern-faced Americans turned over the pages of _The New York Herald_ on the long marble-topped table in the centre, and a woman or two sat here and there absorbed in waiting, and the dowager Lady Tekkleham’s voice nearby was grimly suggesting to the Baron de Belus that he could not do better than let her drive him in her coach-and-six to dinner at her villa at Saint Germain-en-Laye. Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey and my heavy coat, and weighed down, too, by the gloom of the early winter evening that was falling about us, so that my eyes, borne down by Cherry-Marvels amenities, could scarcely make out the chairs and flowers and vases in the long courtyard through the windows; and suddenly I fell to wondering how it had come about that Iris, who loved her proud swift car, had lent it to a friend, but the instant I mentioned her name Cherry-Marvel’s little eyes gleamed with fury at the interruption. I was abashed, yet I would try again, but ... “whereupon Auguste de Maupin, whom, of course, you know as well as I do....” But at last I achieved the impossible, in inserting a wedge into the fabulous monologue, and then I murmured: “Ill? But are you sure, Cherry? Mrs. Storm is ill?” But illness appalled Cherry-Marvel, from illness he could not help but turn away the neat, lined mask of his face, from illness his Florentine _dandysme_ trembled away in the only unaristocratic emotion I have ever observed in Cherry-Marvel, the emotion of fear. “Quiet we call Silence, the merest word of all!” For, appalled by illness though he might be, his art could always rise to a general view.... He had heard in a roundabout way that Iris had had a “sort of minor operation----” “But,” I said--