Page:The Inheritors, An Extravagant Story.djvu/181

 by the thuds of falling boots and the other incomprehensible noises of the night. Through the flimsy partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that is so impossible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of the two men at the Opera. I began to wonder what they had been saying—what they could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little correspondent to interfere. Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern—a clearness from which one cannot take one's eyes.

It threw everything—the whole world—into more unpleasant relations with me than even the Greenland affair. They had not been talking about my aunt and her Salon, but about my. . . my sister. She was de Mersch's "Anglaise." I did not believe it, but probably all Paris—the whole world—said she was. And to the whole world I was her brother! Those two men who had looked at me over their shoulders had shrugged and said, "Oh, he's . . ." And the whole world wherever I went would whisper in asides, "Don't you know Granger? He's the brother. De Mersch employs him."