What do you mean?"

"She did not strike me as so proud. I should say she was shy."

"You are very discriminating. And what do you think of her face?"

"It's handsome!" said Newman.

"I should think it was! Of course you will go and see her."

"To-morrow!" cried Newman.

"No, not to-morrow; the next day. That will be Sunday; she leaves Paris
on Monday. If you don't see her; it will at least be a beginning." And
she gave him Madame de Cintre's address.

He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his
way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain
whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as
suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls
of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a queer way for rich people
to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid facade diffusing its
brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he
had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open
in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, graveled court,
surrounded on three sides with closed windows, and with a doorway facing
the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tin canopy.
The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman's conception of
a convent. The portress could not tell him whether Madame de Cintre was
visible; he would please to apply at the farther door. He crossed the
court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of the portico,
playing with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman approached, and, as
he laid his hand upon the bell, said with a smile, in English, that he
was afraid Newman would be kept waiting; the servants were scattered, he
himself had been ringing, he didn't know what the deuce was in them. He
was a young man, his English was excellent, and his smile very frank.
Newman pronounced the name of Madame de Cintre.

"I think," said the young man, "that my sister is visible. Come in, and
if you will give me your card I will carry it to her myself."

Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight sentiment,
I will not say of defiance--a readiness for aggression or defense, as
they might prove needful--but of reflection, good-humored suspicion. He
took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which,
under his name, he had written the words "San Francisco," and while
he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor