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 was any thing strange in a Frenchwoman running after Nicky Steele. I hadn't lived with him for all these years not to know that. It's wonderful what a bit of a handle to the name will do for a man in Paris; and that Nicolas Steele was a baronet, all the judges in the land could not deny. Nevertheless, I got no real grip on the truth of Jack Ames' story about the Baroness de Moncy, and that's the plain fact of it.

It was nearly dark when I left the Hôtel de Lille and crossed the river by the Pont du Carrousel. Paris was pretty full, though it was only the end of September; and when I came up by the Palais Royal there was a number of people sitting out to have their dinner in the open. I'd made up my mind that I'd ask for Sir Nicolas at the Café de Paris, but without going in to see him; and this I did. But they told me that he had only just looked in for five minutes and had then left.

"Did he go alone?" I asked the man, who was about as civil as he could be.

"He went with a gentleman," was his reply.

"With a gentleman—you don't say that?"

"Certainly; they met here and left together."

Now, I didn't want to let him see that this astonished me; but, if I must tell the truth, it took the wind clean out of my sails.

"Who can it be that he's met?" I asked myself; "and why's he gone off with him? What becomes, then, of the story about this woman at