Luckily for us, there was no affection lost between him and Miss Dora. Talk as he might, the day was rare when she did not plan some excursion with my master. They spent hours together out at Fontainebleau or Versailles—were half their leisure time at the picture-galleries, the other half at the cafés and theatres. I saw them walking arm-in-arm in the gardens, I saw him kiss her when she went to her painting in the morning, I saw him kiss her when she came home again to déjeúner, and I began to think that after all he was right and I was wrong. Then, all of a sudden, the trouble came, and we woke up from our dream.
Michel Grey had disappeared. For the first time since we had been at the hotel, he had exchanged words with my master over the dinner- table. It did not come to blows, but the hands of the people around alone kept the two men apart, and Sir Nicolas was heard by twenty folks to say that he'd beat the life out of the American with his hunting-crop. That night and the next Michel Grey did not sleep in his bed at the Hôtel de Lille. At ten o'clock two mornings later his sister Dora was knocking at my master's door, wanting to know what he had done with him.
I can see her now, with her pretty hair streaming down her back, and her face so flushed that she might have been rubbing her cheeks with a glove. Many women would have thought nothing of a man going off like that; but the quarrel stuck in her head, I suppose, and she was as scared as a rabbit. When
