Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/547

THE AMERICAN she added; "it seemed to me to-day he was rather down."

Newman wondered whom she was talking about, but just then an opening among his neighbours enabled him to turn away, and he said to himself that she was probably paying a tribute to British propriety and feigning a tender solicitude about her parent. Was that miserable old man still treading the path of vice in her train? Was he still giving her the benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to serve as her interpreter? Newman walked some distance further and then began to retrace his steps, taking care not to accompany again those of Mademoiselle Nioche. At last he looked for a chair under the trees, but he had some difficulty in finding an empty one. He was about to give up the search when he saw a gentleman rise from the seat he had been occupying, leaving our friend to take it without looking at his neighbours. Newman sat there for some time without heeding them; his attention was lost in the rage of his renewed vision of the little fatal fact of Noémie. But at the end of a quarter of an hour, dropping his eyes, he perceived a small pugdog squatted on the path near his feet—a diminutive but very perfect specimen of its interesting species. The pug was sniffing at the fashionable world, as it passed him, with his little black muzzle, and was kept from extending his investigation by a large blue ribbon attached to his collar with an enormous rosette and held in the hand of a person seated next Newman. To this person our hero transferred his attention, and immediately found himself 517