But that was so wherever they went that night; and, in a sense, they went everywhere.  In no city in the world is the doctrine of go-as-you-please-but-mind-your-own-business more studiously inculcated by example than in Paris, especially in its hours of relaxation.  Lanyard had not been so long an exile as to have forgotten his way about entirely, and with what was new since his time Mademoiselle Reneaux was thoroughly acquainted.  And if he felt himself rather a ghost revisiting glimpses of a forgotten moon, if all the odalisques were new to his vision and all the sultans strange, if never an eye that scanned his face turned back for a second look in uncertain reminiscence, he had to console him the company of a young woman whom everybody seemed to know and admire and like.  In none of the resorts they visited did she fail to greet or be hailed by a handful of acquaintances.  Yet they were generously let alone.

As to that, Lanyard could not complain.  The truth was that, despite the dark thread of sober purpose which ran through those tolerably purple hours, he was being excellently entertained.  Not by this sad business of scampering from one place of dubious fame to another; not by any reckless sense of rejuvenation to be distilled from the practice of buying champagne at each stop—­and leaving every bottle barely tasted; not by those colourful, dissolving tableaux, always much the same in composition if set against various backgrounds, of under-dressed women sitting with concupiscent men and swallowing cold poisons in quantities calculated to spur them into the frenzy of semi-orgiastic dances:  by none of these, but simply by the society of a woman of a type perhaps not unique but novel in his experience and intriguing to his understanding.

If there were anybody or thing a girl of her age—­Athenais was about twenty-five—­shouldn’t know, she knew him, her or it; if there were any place she shouldn’t go, she either went or had been there; if there were anything she shouldn’t do or say or think or countenance, those things she—­within limitations—­did and said and thought and accepted or passed over as matters of fact and no consequence.  And though she observed scrupulously certain self-imposed limitations she never made this obvious, she simply avoided what she chose to consider bad taste with a deftness and tact that would have seemed admirable in a woman of the great world twice her age.  And with it all she preserved a sort of champagne effervescence of youthful spirits and an easy-going cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated to days of adventure always dangerous, generally sordid, and like at any time to prove deadly.

Young, beautiful, admirably poised, accomplished and intelligent, she should by rights have been wrapped up in love of some man her peer in all these attributes.  But she wasn’t; or she said she wasn’t in one of those moments of gravity which served to throw into higher relief the light-heartedness of her badinage with Lanyard; asserting an entirely willing disposition to stand aside and play the pensive, amused, indulgent spectator in the masque of love danced by a world mad for it, grasping for love greedily even in its cheapest shapes and guises.