I was right about her being no nun. She was a lay-sister, she said. And this place, she told me, was a convent-nursing-home. “_Nous avons ici_,” she was pleased to add, “_la clientèle européenne la plus chic_.” Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a _clientèle européenne la plus chic_.... One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America. My poor ten-franc note must have seemed pathetic to this old lay-sister, who probably thought nothing of receiving a _mille_ from an anxious Dago. I had until then been trying not to wonder about Iris in the vile shadow of a prison. Suddenly I was furiously hot. What on earth was I doing here! Intruding where I was not wanted! I was about to go, to run, when the lay-sister was as though distracted from the last piece of carrot by the opening of a door in the back room. Frantically she hurried towards it. It would look too silly of me to run now. I could but ask, anyhow. The lay-sister’s voice, voluble, vindictive, explanatory. Much good my ten francs had done! Then steps came towards me, into the lodge. “Eh,” I said. How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards.... A man, bald, sharp-featured as a bird, in a rough brown great-coat, a tired-looking, an anxious-looking, middle-aged--Englishman! “Masters! Conrad Masters!” “Well,” muttered that anxious-looking man. He looked just the same when he was playing bridge. He was always playing bridge, that man. And he said he hated playing bridge. That kind of man. “Well? How are you?” “Glad,” I said, “glad it’s no worse. Glad it’s only you. I was afraid of a purple beard.” “And how did you get here?” A man given to muttering, that. One could hear what he said or not just as one pleased. One couldn’t, you understand, be afraid of Conrad Masters. “Masters, the fight I’ve had with this Cerberus to see you!” “Rules ... must have rules, you know....” A decidedly undecided man. Soft-speaking but not plausible, a combination peculiarly English. A man of nerves. Shifty without suavity ... and then, suddenly, apt to bite your head off like a very captain of men: “And how did you know Mrs. Storm was ill? Here?” “Oh,” I said. “Well....” And I thought of many things. Of Conrad Masters, of “Should a doctor tell?” of Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, of Mrs. Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that. “Who but Cherry-Marvel told me!” said I. “God in Heaven, that man!” But Iris swept out of my mind her doctor’s problematical indiscretions to his dashing wife.... “Ill,” he muttered. “Decidedly ill.... mm....” “I heard,” I said desperately, “that she’d had a sort of operation--”