“I am sorry, Monsieur,” replied the waiter, “but this table is reserved by a lady who takes here all her repasts. Monsieur can see that it is so by the half-finished bottle of mineral water.” He held up the bottle of Evian in token of his veracity. Scrawled in pencil across the label ran the inscription, “Mlle. Hastings.” “Mademoiselle Hastings!” cried Martin. “Why, that is the lady I am expecting.” The waiter smiled copiously. Monsieur was a friend of Miss Hastings? Then it was a different matter. Mademoiselle said she would be back to-night and that was why her bottle of Evian had been preserved for her. She was the only one left of the enormous clientèle of the restaurant. It was a restaurant of students. In the students’ season, not a table for the chance comer. All engaged. The students paid so much per week or per month for nourishment. It really was a pension, _enfin_, for board without lodging. When the students were away from Paris the restaurant was kept open at a loss; not a very great loss, for in Paris one knew how to accommodate oneself to circumstance. Good provincials and English tourists sometimes wandered in. One always then indicated the decorations, real masterpieces some of them. . . . Only a day or two ago an American traveller had taken photographs. If Monsieur would deign to look round . . . Martin deigned. Drawings in charcoal and crayon on the distempered walls, caricatures, bold nudes, bars of music, bits of satiric verse, flowing signatures, bore evidence of the passage of many generations of students. “It amuses them,” said the waiter, “and gives the place a character.” He was pointing out the masterpieces when a young voice by the door sang out: “Hallo, Martin!” Martin turned and met the welcoming eyes of Corinna Hastings, fair-haired, slender, neatly dressed in blue serge coat and skirt and a cheap little hat to which a long pheasant’s feather gave a touch of bravado. “You’re a real Godsend,” she declared. “I was thinking of throwing myself into the river, only there would have been no one on the deserted bridge to fish me out again. I am the last creature left in Paris.” “I am more than lucky then to find you, Corinna,” said Martin. “For you’re the only person in Paris that I know.” “How did you find my address?” “I went down to Wendlebury——” “Then you saw them all?” said Corinna, as they took their seats at the window-table. “Father and mother and Bessie and Joan and Ada, etcetera, etcetera down to the new baby. The new baby makes ten of us alive—really he’s the fourteenth. I wonder how many more there are going to be?” “I shouldn’t think there would be any more,” replied Martin gravely. Corinna burst out laughing. “What on earth can you know about it?” The satirical challenge brought a flush to Martin’s sallow cheek. What did he know in fact of the very intimate concerns of the Reverend Thomas Hastings and his wife?