Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/319

THE AMERICAN She had instantly recognised me and I had to hear her history from ever so far back. But after that I put her on that of her neighbours. She knows and admires Noémie, and she told me what I've just repeated."

A month elapsed without any reappearance of M. Nioche, and Newman, who every morning read, for practice, about the suicides of the day in a newspaper, began to suspect that, mortification proving stubborn, he had sought a balm for his wounded pride in the waters of the Seine. He had a note of the poor gentleman's address in his pocket-book, and, finding himself one day in the quartier, determined, so far as he might, to clear up his doubts. He repaired to the house in the Rue Saint-Roch which bore the recorded number, and observed in a neighbouring basement, behind a dangling row of neatly inflated gloves, the unmistakeable face of Valentin's informant—a sallow person in a dressing-gown peering into the street as if in expectation that this amiable nobleman would pass again. But it was not to her that Newman applied; he simply enquired of the portress if M. Nioche were at home. The portress replied, as the portress invariably replies, that her lodger had gone out barely three minutes before, but then, through the little square hole of her lodge-window, taking the measure of Newman's resources and seeing them, by an unspecified process, refresh the dry places of servitude to occupants of fifth floors on courts, she added that M. Nioche would have had just time to reach the Café de la Patrie, round the second turning to the left, at which establishment 289