Jenkins paced a few steps in the studio, much moved, with avowals on the tip of his tongue which yet dared not put themselves into words.  At length, feeling himself dismissed, he took his hat and walked towards the door.

“So it is understood.  I must bring him to see you.”

“Who?”

“Why, the Nabob.  It was you who this very moment——­”

“Ah, yes,” remarked the strange person whose caprices were short-lived.  “Bring him if you like.  I don’t care, otherwise.”

And her beautiful dejected voice, in which something seemed broken, the listlessness of her whole personality, said distinctly enough that it was true, that she cared really for nothing in the world.

Jenkins left the room, extremely troubled, and with a gloomy brow.  But, the moment he was outside, he assumed once more his laughing and cordial expression, being of those who, in the streets, go masked.  The morning was advancing.  The mist, still perceptible in the vicinity of the Seine, floated now only in shreds and gave a vaporous unsubstantiality to the houses on the quay, to the river steamers whose paddles remained invisible, to the distant horizon in which the dome of the Invalides hung poised like a gilded balloon with a rope that darted sunbeams.  A diffused warmth, the movement in the streets, told that noon was not far distant, that it would be there directly with the striking of all the bells.

Before going on to the Nabob’s, Jenkins had, however, one other visit to make.  But he appeared to find it a great nuisance.  However, since he had made the promise!  And, resolutely: 

“68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, at the Ternes,” he said, as he sprang into his carriage.

The address required to be repeated twice to the coachman, Joey, who was scandalized; the very horse showed a momentary hesitation, as if the valuable beast and the impeccably clad servant had felt revolt at the idea of driving out to such a distant suburb, beyond the limited but so brilliant circle wherein their master’s clients were scattered.  The carriage arrived, all the same, without accident, at the end of a provincial-looking, unfinished street, and at the last of its buildings, a house of unfurnished apartments with five stories, which the street seemed to have despatched forward as a reconnoitring party to discover whether it might continue on that side isolated as it stood between vaguely marked-out sites waiting to be built upon or heaped with the debris of houses broken down, with blocks of freestone, old shutters lying amid the desolation, mouldy butchers’ blocks with broken hinges hanging, an immense ossuary of a whole demolished region of the town.