ch was a lie!

They drove home down the Bois--the cool, spacious, tree-bordered
Bois--and through the Champs Elysees. Because he was an artist in his
way, and because every passing _fiacre_ revealed the same picture, Max
Tack sat very near her and looked very tender and held her hand in his.
It would have raised a laugh at Broadway and Forty-second. It was quite,
quite sane and very comforting in Paris.

At the door of the hotel:

"I'm sailing Wednesday," said Max Tack. "You--you won't forget me?"

"Oh, no--no!"

"You'll call me up or run into the office when you get to New York?"

"Oh, yes!"

He walked with her to the lift, said good-bye and returned to the
_fiacre_ with the tinkling bell. There was a stunned sort of look in his
face. The _fiacre_ meter registered two francs seventy. Max Tack did a
lightning mental calculation. The expression on his face deepened. He
looked up at the cabby--the red-faced, bottle-nosed cabby, with his
absurd scarlet vest, his mustard-coloured trousers and his glazed top
hat.

"Well, can you beat that? Three francs thirty for the evening's
entertainment! Why--why, all she wanted was just a little love!"

To the bottle-nosed one all conversation in a foreign language meant
dissatisfaction with the meter. He tapped that glass-covered contrivance
impatiently with his whip. A flood of French bubbled at his lips.

"It's all right, boy! It's all right! You don't get me!" And Max Tacked
pressed a five-franc piece into the outstretched palm. Then to the hotel
porter: "Just grab a taxi for me, will you? These tubs make me nervous."

Sophy, on her way to her room, hesitated, turned, then ran up the stairs
to the next floor and knocked gently at Miss Morrissey's door. A moment
later that lady's kimonoed figure loomed large in the doorway.

"Who is--oh, it's you! Well, I was just going to have them drag the
Seine for you. Come in!"

She went back to the table. Sheets of paper, rough sketches of hat
models done from memory, notes and letters lay scattered all about.
Sophy leaned against the door dreamily.

"I've been working this whole mortal evening," went on Ella Morrissey,
holding up a pencil sketch and squinting at it disapprovingly over her
working spectacles, "and I'm so tired that one eye's shut and the
other's running on first. Where've you been, child?"

"Oh, driving!" Sophy's limp hair was a shade limper than usual, and a
strand of it had become loosened and straggled unti