Chapter 30

A few days after her decisive conversation with Raymond de Chelles,
Undine, emerging from the doors of the Nouveau Luxe, where she had been
to call on the newly-arrived Mrs. Homer Branney, once more found herself
face to face with Elmer Moffatt.

This time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. He
stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that
she too stopped, holding out her hand.

"I'm glad you're going to speak to me," she said, and Moffatt reddened at
the allusion.

"Well, I very nearly didn't. I didn't know you. You look about as old as
you did when I first landed at Apex--remember?"

He turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the
Champs Elysees.

"Say--this is all right!" he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had
left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to
the congregated domes and spires beyond the river.

"Do you like Paris?" she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to.

"It beats everything." He seemed to be breathing in deeply the
impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy' avenues and long-drawn
architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze.

"I suppose you've been to that old church over there?" he went on, his
gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of Notre Dame.

"Oh, of course; when I used to sightsee. Have you never been to Paris
before?"

"No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March."

"In March?" she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that
other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision,
and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt.
"Wasn't that a bad time to leave Wall Street?"

"Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change." Nothing in
his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to
develop it. "I presume you're settled here now?" he went on. "I saw by
the papers--"

"Yes," she interrupted; adding, after a moment: "It was all a mistake
from the first."

"Well, I never thought he was your form," said Moffatt.

His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as
something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had
glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed
his attention.

"I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with
me?" she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs,
and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed