onality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had
never got beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and
what his occupations were. He was presumably a bachelor--a man of
family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent
from home would not have been as regularly present in the same
place--and there was about him a boundless desultoriness which renewed
Garnett's conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an
American who is not busy. From certain allusions it was plain that he
had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to
adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the
accent of one who has formed his conception of the language from a
phrase-book.

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its
speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual curiosities, to
remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving,
perhaps the more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American
astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence rather than of
experience. His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in
the political problems of his adopted country, though they appeared to
preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of mankind.
The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though
his examples of it seemed mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous
daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on his
favorite theme. If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger
man, it was because he fancied he could detect under it the tragic
implication of the fixed idea--of some great moral upheaval which had
flung his friend stripped and starving on the desert island of the
little cafe where they met. He hardly knew wherein he read this
revelation--whether in the resigned shabbiness of the sage's dress, the
impartial courtesy of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which
lurked, indescribably, in his guileless yet suspicious eye. There were
moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked
like a man who had seen a ghost.

II

AN apparition almost as startling had come to Garnett himself in the
shape of the mauve note received from his _concierge_ as he was leaving
the hotel for luncheon.

Not that, on the face of it, a missive announcing Mrs. Sam Newell's
arrival at Ritz's, and her need of his presence