loungers, bulged out
on to the broad pavements.... The momentary vision was shut off instantly
as the taxis shot down the mouth of a dark narrow street; but it had been
long enough to make Audrey's heart throb.

"What is that?" she asked.

"That?" exclaimed Nick kindly. "Oh! That's only the _grand boulevard_."

Then they crossed the sombre, lamp-reflecting Seine, and soon afterwards
the two taxis stopped at a vast black door in a very wide street of serried
palatial facades that were continually shaken by the rushing tumult of
electric cars. Tommy jumped out and pushed a button, and the door
automatically split in two, disclosing a vast and dim tunnel. Tommy ran
within, and came out again with a coatless man in a black-and-yellow
striped waistcoat and a short white apron. This man, Musa, and the two
chauffeurs entered swiftly into a complex altercation, which endured until
Audrey had paid the chauffeurs and all the trunks had been transported
behind the immense door and the door bangingly shut.

"Vehy amusing, isn't it?" whispered Miss Ingate caustically to Audrey.
"Aren't they dears?"

"Madame Dubois's establishment is on the third and fourth floors," said
Nick.

They climbed a broad, curving, carpeted staircase.

"We're here," said Audrey to Miss Ingate after scores of stairs.

Miss Ingate, breathless, could only smile.

And Audrey profoundly felt that she was in Paris. The mere shape of the
doorknob by the side of a brass plate lettered "Madame Dubois" told her
that she was in an exotic land.

And in the interior of Madame Dubois's establishment Tommy and Nick
together drew apart the curtains, opened the windows, and opened the
shutters of a pleasantly stuffy sitting-room. Everybody leaned out, and
they saw the superb thoroughfare, straight and interminable, and the moving
roofs of the tram-cars, and dwarfs on the pavements. The night was mild
and languorous.

"You see that!" Nick pointed to a blaze of electricity to the left on the
opposite side of the road. "That's where we shall take you to dine, after
you've spruced yourselves up. You needn't bother about fancy dress.
Monsieur Dauphin always has stacks of kimonos--for his models, you know."

While the travellers spruced themselves up in different bedrooms, Tommy
chattered through one pair of double doors ajar, and Nick through the
other, and Musa strummed with many mistakes on an antique Pleyel piano. And
as Audrey listened to the talk of these acq