live Two agreed. "Nice little thing! But how tired and
unwell she looks! They did well to bring her away."

"Oh!" said Edward Coe, "she probably didn't sleep well because she was
afraid of oversleeping herself. She looked perfectly all right
yesterday."

THE SUPREME ILLUSION

I

Perhaps it was because I was in a state of excited annoyance that I did
not recognize him until he came right across the large hall of the hotel
and put his hand on my shoulder.

I had arrived in Paris that afternoon, and driven to that nice,
reasonable little hotel which we all know, and whose name we all give in
confidence to all our friends; and there was no room in that hotel. Nor
in seven other haughtily-managed hotels that I visited! A kind of
archduke, who guarded the last of the seven against possible customers,
deigned to inform me that the season was at its fullest, half London
being as usual in Paris, and that the only central hotels where I had a
chance of reception were those monstrosities the Grand and the Hotel
Terminus at the Gare St Lazare. I chose the latter, and was accorded
room 973 in the roof.

I thought my exasperations were over. But no! A magnificent porter
within the gate had just consented to get my luggage off the cab, and
was in the act of beginning to do so, when a savagely-dressed, ugly and
ageing woman, followed by a maid, rushed neurotically down the steps and
called him away to hold a parcel. He obeyed! At the same instant the
barbaric and repulsive creature's automobile, about as large as a
railway carriage, drove up and forced my frail cab down the street. I
had to wait, humiliated and helpless, the taximeter of my cab
industriously adding penny to penny, while that offensive hag installed
herself, with the help of the maid, the porter and two page-boys, in her
enormous vehicle. I should not have minded had she been young and
pretty. If she had been young and pretty she would have had the right to
be rude and domineering. But she was neither young nor pretty.
Conceivably she had once been young; pretty she could never have been.
And her eyes were hard--hard.

Hence my state of excited annoyance.

"Hullo! How goes it?" The perfect colloquial English was gently murmured
at me with a French accent as the gentle hand patted my shoulder.

"Why," I said, cast violently out of a disagreeable excitement into an
agreeable one, "I do believe you are Boissy Minor!"

I had not seen him for nearl