What on earth had possessed Mark Pryor to start him on this trail? Confound it! It had all grown out of a chance encounter with Pryor in Charlotte Beecher’s studio one fatal afternoon. The fellow had taken him aside and poured out a harrowing story of Janet’s miseries coupled with a picture of her dependence on Cornelia! But for that _rencontre_, he wouldn’t have gone on this wild-goose chase from Geneva to Paris to rescue Janet from a gilded cage. A gilded cage! No, by heaven! He might be living in a gilded cage himself (the gilt being drawn from Charlotte Beecher’s gilt-edged securities), instead of in one-third of a model tenement flat in Kips Bay. To think that Pryor, the transcendently practical Pryor, should have been the instigator of this fatuous proceeding! Hang the fellow for his unwarranted meddling and plausible tongue! He reached Fontainebleau in a drizzling rain and voted it a sleek and stupid place. In the chilly Hotel de Londres he had ample leisure to reflect on his folly. Sightseeing! His business in the world was to create new sights not to see old ones. A fat lot he cared for chateaux in which the greasy Bourbons had entertained their mistresses and in which streams of tourists would be sure to blink in awe at vulgarly showy decorations or childishly ornamented bric-a-brac, not to mention the celebrated, idiotic insipidities painted by Boucher and David. Merely to read about these "sights" in the guidebook made him sick. Why hadn’t he followed his own nose instead of letting Cornelia map, or rather, Baedeker, his course for him? "What dire offence from trivial causes springs," he silently quoted. His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact, that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia’s stony heart melt into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think it over, in his present plight. Well, on this occasion she had _not_ been as wax in his hands. Nor had she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become playful: it was the playfulness of the panther. She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.