ve been talking. The music's a fearful din.' He
felt nearly as Parisian as Tom looked.

'_Tiens!_' Cosette twittered to Loulou, making a gesture towards Henry's
ears. '_Regarde-moi ces oreilles. Sont jolies. Pas?_'

And she brought her teeth together with a click that seemed to render
somewhat doubtful Tom's assurance that she would not eat Henry.

Soon afterwards Tom and Henry left the auditorium, and Henry parted from
Cosette with mingled sensations of regret and relief. He might never see
her again. Geraldine....

But Tom did not emerge from the outer precincts of the vast music-hall
without several more conversations with fellows-well-met, and when he
and Henry reached the pavement, Cosette and Loulou happened to be just
getting into a cab. Tom did not see them, but Henry and Cosette caught
sight of each other. She beckoned to him.

'You come and take lunch with me to-morrow? _Hein?_' she almost
whispered in that ear of his.

'_Avec plaisir_,' said Henry. He had studied French regularly for six
years at school.

'Rue de Bruxelles, No. 3,' she instructed him. 'Noon.'

'I know it!' he exclaimed delightedly. He had, in fact, passed through
the street during the day.

No one had ever told him before that his ears were pretty.

When, after parleying nervously with the concierge, he arrived at the
second-floor of No. 3, Rue de Bruxelles, he heard violent high sounds of
altercation through the door at which he was about to ring, and then the
door opened, and a young woman, flushed and weeping, was sped out on to
the landing, Cosette herself being the exterminator.

'Ah, _mon ami_!' said Cosette, seeing him. 'Enter then.'

She charmed him inwards and shut the door, breathing quickly.

'It is my _domestique_, my servant, who steals me,' she explained. 'Come
and sit down in the salon. I will tell you.'

The salon was a little room about eight feet by ten, silkily furnished.
Besides being the salon, it was clearly also the _salle a manger_, and
when one person had sat down therein it was full. Cosette took Henry's
hat and coat and umbrella and pressed him into a chair by the shoulders,
and then gave him the full history of her unparalleled difficulties with
the exterminated servant. She looked quite a different Cosette now from
the Cosette of the previous evening. Her black hair was loose; her face
pale, and her lips also a little pale; and she was draped from neck to
feet in a crimson peignoir, very fluffy.