e necessity of action, to postpone perforce the fruitless
contemplation of his private grievance, was cause enough for gratitude,
even if the small adventure in which he found himself involved had not,
on its own merits, roused an instinctive curiosity to see it through.

When he and his companion, the night before, had reached the Farlows'
door in the rue de la Chaise, it was only to find, after repeated
assaults on its panels, that the Farlows were no longer there. They
had moved away the week before, not only from their apartment but from
Paris; and Miss Viner's breach with Mrs. Murrett had been too sudden to
permit her letter and telegram to overtake them. Both communications,
no doubt, still reposed in a pigeon-hole of the loge; but its custodian,
when drawn from his lair, sulkily declined to let Miss Viner verify the
fact, and only flung out, in return for Darrow's bribe, the statement
that the Americans had gone to Joigny.

To pursue them there at that hour was manifestly impossible, and Miss
Viner, disturbed but not disconcerted by this new obstacle, had quite
simply acceded to Darrow's suggestion that she should return for what
remained of the night to the hotel where he had sent his luggage.

The drive back through the dark hush before dawn, with the nocturnal
blaze of the Boulevard fading around them like the false lights of
a magician's palace, had so played on her impressionability that she
seemed to give no farther thought to her own predicament. Darrow noticed
that she did not feel the beauty and mystery of the spectacle as much
as its pressure of human significance, all its hidden implications
of emotion and adventure. As they passed the shadowy colonnade of the
Francais, remote and temple-like in the paling lights, he felt a clutch
on his arm, and heard the cry: "There are things THERE that I want so
desperately to see!" and all the way back to the hotel she continued to
question him, with shrewd precision and an artless thirst for detail,
about the theatrical life of Paris. He was struck afresh, as he
listened, by the way in which her naturalness eased the situation of
constraint, leaving to it only a pleasant savour of good fellowship. It
was the kind of episode that one might, in advance, have characterized
as "awkward", yet that was proving, in the event, as much outside such
definitions as a sunrise stroll with a dryad in a dew-drenched forest;
and Darrow reflected that mankind would never have ne