affairs
in my own way. If I don't stop him, he'll carry the Princess Aline off
by force and send me word where he has hidden her."

The Hohenwalds had evidently departed for a day's outing, as up to five
o'clock they had not returned; and Carlton, after loitering all the
afternoon, gave up waiting for them, and went out to dine at Laurent's,
in the Champs Elysees. He had finished his dinner, and was leaning
luxuriously forward, with his elbows on the table, and knocking the
cigar ashes into his coffee-cup. He was pleasantly content. The trees
hung heavy with leaves over his head, a fountain played and overflowed
at his elbow, and the lamps of the fiacres passing and repassing on the
Avenue of the Champs Elysees shone like giant fire-flies through the
foliage. The touch of the gravel beneath his feet emphasized the free,
out-of-door charm of the place, and the faces of the others around him
looked more than usually cheerful in the light of the candles
flickering under the clouded shades. His mind had gone back to his
earlier student days in Paris, when life always looked as it did now in
the brief half-hour of satisfaction which followed a cold bath or a
good dinner, and he had forgotten himself and his surroundings. It was
the voices of the people at the table behind him that brought him back
to the present moment. A man was talking; he spoke in English, with an
accent.

"I should like to go again through the Luxembourg," he said; "but you
need not be bound by what I do."

"I think it would be pleasanter if we all keep together," said a girl's
voice, quietly. She also spoke in English, and with the same accent.

The people whose voices had interrupted him were sitting and standing
around a long table, which the waiters had made large enough for their
party by placing three of the smaller ones side by side; they had
finished their dinner, and the women, who sat with their backs towards
Carlton, were pulling on their gloves.

"Which is it to be, then?" said the gentleman, smiling. "The pictures
or the dressmakers?"

The girl who had first spoken turned to the one next to her.

"Which would you rather do, Aline?" she asked.

Carlton moved so suddenly that the men behind him looked at him
curiously; but he turned, nevertheless, in his chair and faced them,
and in order to excuse his doing so beckoned to one of the waiters. He
was within two feet of the girl who had been called "Aline." She
raised her