All day Eugene slept the dreamless, soundless sleep of a man who has been drugged. When he awoke, night had come again. And this concatenation of night to night, of dreamless and exhausted sleep upon the strange terrific nightmare of the night before, the swift kaleidoscope of moving action which had filled his life for the past two days, now gave to that recent period a haunting and disturbing distance, and to the events that had gone before the sad finality of irrevocable time. Suddenly he felt as if his life with Ann, Elinor, and Starwick was finished, done; for some strangely troubling reason he could not define, he felt that he would never see them again.

He got up, dressed, and went downstairs. He saw old Gely and his wife, his daughters, Marie the maid, and the little concierge: it seemed to him that they looked at him strangely, curiously, with some sorrowful sad knowledge in their eyes, and a nameless numb excitement gripped him, dulled his heart. He felt the nameless apprehension that he always felt — that perhaps all men feel — when they have been away a day or two. It was a premonition of bad news, of some unknown misfortune: he wanted to ask them if someone had come for him — without knowing who could come — if they had a message for him — not knowing who might send him one — an almost feverish energy to demand that they tell him at once what unknown calamity had befallen him in his absence. But he said nothing, but still haunted by what he thought was the strange and troubling look in their eyes — a look he had often thought he observed in people, which seemed to tell of a secret knowledge, an inhuman chemistry, a communion in men’s lives to which his own life was a stranger — he hurried out into the street.

Outside the streets were wet with mist, the old cobbles shone with a dull wet gleam, through the mist the lamps burned dimly, and through the fog he heard the swift and unseen passing of the taxi-cabs, the shrill tooting of their little horns.

Yet everything was ghost-like and phantasmal — the streets of Paris had the unfamiliar reality of streets that one revisits after many years of absence, or walks again after the confinement of a long and serious illness.

He ate at a little restaurant in the Rue de la Seine, and troubled by the dismal lights, the high old houses, and the empty streets of the Latin Quarter sounding only with the brief passage of some furious little taxi drilling through those narrow lanes towards the bridge of the Seine and the great blaze and gaiety of night, he finally forsook that dark quarter, which seemed to be the image of the unquiet loneliness that beset him, and crossing the bridge, he spent the remainder of the evening reading in one of the cafés near Les Magasins du Louvre.

The next morning, when he awoke, a pneumatique was waiting for him. It was from Elinor, and read:

“Darling, where are you? Are you still recovering from the great debauch, or have you given us the go-by, or what? The suspense is awful — won’t you say it ain’t so, and come to lunch with us today at half-past twelve? We’ll be waiting for you at the studio. — ELINOR”— Below this in a round and almost childish hand, was written: “We want to see you. We missed you yesterday. — ANN.”

He read this brief and casual little note over again and again, he laughed exultantly, and smote his fist into the air and read again. All of the old impossible joy was revived in him. He went to the window and looked out: a lemony sunlight was falling on the old pale walls and roofs and chimney-pots of Paris: everything sparkled with health and hope and work and morning — and all because two girls from Boston in New England had written him a note.

He held the flimsy paper of the pneumatique tenderly, as if it were a sacred parchment too old and precious for rough handling; he even lifted it to his nose and smelled it. It seemed to him that all the subtle, sensuous femininity of the two women was in it — the seductive and thrilling fragrance, impalpable and glorious as the fragrance of a flower, which their lives seemed to irradiate and to give to everything, to everyone they touched, a sense of triumph, joy and tenderness. He read the one blunt line that Ann had written him as if it were poetry of haunting magic: the level, blunt and toneless inflexibility of her voice sounded in the line as if she had spoken; he read into her simple words a thousand buried meanings — the tenderness of a profound, simple and inarticulate spirit, whose feelings were too deep for language, who had no words for them.

When he got to the studio he found the two women waiting, but Starwick was not there. Ann was quietly, bluntly matter of fact as usual; Elinor almost hilariously gay, but beneath her gaiety he sensed at once a deep and worried perturbation, a worn anxiety that shone nakedly from her troubled eyes.

They told him that on their return from Rheims, Starwick had left the studio to meet Alec and had not been seen since. No word from him had they had that night or the day before, and now, on the second day since his disappearance, their anxiety was evident.

But during lunch — they ate at a small restaurant in the neighbourhood, near the Montparnasse railway station — Elinor kept up a gay and rapid conversation, and persisted in speaking of Starwick’s disappearance as a great lark — the kind of thing to be expected from him.

“PERFECTLY insane, of course!” she cried, with a gay laugh. “But then, it’s typical of him: it’s just the kind of thing that kind would do. Oh, he’ll turn up, of course,” she said, with quiet confidence, “— he’ll turn up in a day or two, after some wild adventure that no one in the world but Francis Starwick could have had. . . . I MEAN!” she cried, &ldquo............