but he went the same afternoon to leave his card in the Rue de Lisbonne, and the next night he dined there. I knew at once that this was no ordinary affair, for he had brought plenty of money in his pockets from Vienna; and when he began to go to madame's house almost as regularly as I went to the Café Rouge, I said to myself that he was tied up for the winter, at any rate. And so it proved. Christmas passed, and still found him dancing attendance. He was harder hit than ever at the end of January. The matter seemed to come to a head in March, when he began, all of a sudden, to order clothes enough to stock a tailor's shop, and to make preparations for leaving Paris.
Now, during all these weeks he had never said a word to me of the woman, or of his own intentions about her. Whether he remembered our bit of a difference at the Gare de l'Est, or whether he had something in his mind which he did hot want me to know, I never found out. And though I did my best to get an inkling of what was going on in the Rue de Lisbonne, I never succeeded. You might as well have tried to pump an East End waterworks as the concierge of. that hotel. The only servant Mme. Pauline had was a saucy bit of goods, who could roll out lies like an auctioneer. Watch the place as I did—and my eyes were rarely off it in my leisure hours—I never learned more than common-sense had told me at home. Twice a week he dined with her, or she dined with him. For the rest, they went to
