“Oh, you needn’t be so thoughtful of my reputation!  If this were the worst that could be said of me—­”

Lanyard laughed in turn, quietly tolerant, and squeezed her hand again.

“You are a dear,” he said, “but you need to be a far better actress to deceive me about such matters.”

“Don’t be stupid!” her sulky voice retorted.

“I’m not.”

He bent forward again, folding his arms on the ledge of the apron, studying the streets and consulting an astonishingly accurate mental map of Paris which more than once had stood him in good stead in other times.

After a little the girl’s hand crept along his arm, took possession of his hand and used it as a lever to swing him back to face her.

In the stronger lighting of the Boulevard Haussmann her face seemed oddly childlike, oddly luminous with appeal.

“Please, petit Monsieur Paul!  I ask it of you, I wish it....  To please me?”

“O Lord!” Lanyard sighed—­“how is one to resist when you plead so prettily to be compromised?”

“Since that’s settled”—­of a sudden the imploring child was replaced by self-possessed Mademoiselle Athenais Reneaux—­“you may have your hand back again.  I assure you I have no more use for it.”

The hansom turned off the boulevard, affording Lanyard an opportunity to look back through the side window.

“Still on the trail,” he announced.  “But they’ve got the lights on now.”

With a profound sigh from the heart the horse stopped in front of a corner apartment building and later, with a groan almost human, responded to the whip and jingled the hansom away, leaving Lanyard the poorer by the exorbitant fare he had promised and something more.

Athenais was already at the main entrance, ringing for the concierge.  Lanyard hastened to join her, but before he could cross the sidewalk a motor-car poked its nose round the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann, a short block away, and bore swiftly their way, seeming to search the street suspiciously with its blank, lidless eyes of glare.

“Peste!” breathed the girl.  “I have a private entrance and my own key.  We could have used that had I imagined this sacred pig of a concierge—!”

The latch clicked.  She thrust the door open and slipped into dense darkness.  Lanyard lingered another instant.  The car was slowing down, and the street lamp on the corner revealed plainly a masculine arm resting on its window-sill; but the spying face above the arm was only a blur.

“Come, monsieur!”

Lanyard stepped in and shut the door.  A hand with which he was beginning to feel fairly well acquainted found his and led him through the dead obscurity to another pause.  A key grated in a lock, the hand drew him on again, a second door closed behind him.

“We are chez moi,” said a voice in the dark.

“One could do with a light.”

“Wait.  This way.”