I

STE. MARIE HEARS OF A MYSTERY AND MEETS A DARK LADY

From Ste. Marie's little flat, which overlooked the gardens, they drove
down the quiet rue du Luxembourg, and at the Place St. Sulpice turned to
the left. They crossed the Place St. Germain des Pres, where lines of
home-bound working-people stood waiting for places in the electric
trams, and groups of students from the Beaux Arts or from Julien's sat
under the awnings of the Deux Magots, and so, beyond that busy square,
they came into the long and peaceful stretch of the Boulevard St.
Germain. The warm, sweet dusk gathered round them as they went, and the
evening air was fresh and aromatic in their faces. There had been a
little gentle shower in the late afternoon, and roadway and pavement
were still damp with it. It had wet the new-grown leaves of the
chestnuts and acacias that bordered the street. The scent of that living
green blended with the scent of laid dust and the fragrance of the last
late-clinging chestnut blossoms; it caught up a fuller, richer burden
from the overflowing front of a florist's shop; it stole from open
windows a savory whiff of cooking, a salt tang of wood smoke; and the
soft little breeze--the breeze of coming summer--mixed all together and
tossed them and bore them down the long, quiet street; and it was the
breath of Paris, and it shall be in your nostrils and mine, a keen agony
of sweetness, so long as we may live and so wide as we may
wander--because we have known it and loved it--and in the end we shall
go back to breathe it when we die.

The strong white horse jogged evenly along over the wooden pavement, its
head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went.
The cocher, a torpid, purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pearlike,
sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an
extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-colored coat wrong
side before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large strange toy,
and his strident voice said:

"He!" to the stout white horse, which paid no attention whatever. Once
the beast stumbled and the pearlike lump of flesh insulted it, saying:

"He! veux tu, cochon!"

Before the War Office a little black slip of a milliner's girl dodged
under the horse's head, saving herself and the huge box slung to her arm
by a miracle of agility, and the cocher called her the most frightful
names, without turning his head and in a perfunctory tone quite f