ight, m'sieur? Why, you have saved me! I owe you a debt which I can
never repay--never." And the laces at her throat rose and fell as she
sighed, her wonderful eyes still fixed upon me.

Gradually the wintry sun rose over the bare, frozen wine-lands over
which we were speeding, when with a sudden application of the brakes we
pulled up at a little station for a change of engine.

Then, after three minutes, we were off again, until at nine o'clock we
ran slowly into the huge terminus in Paris.

She had tidied her hair, washed, brushed her dress, and, as I assisted
her to alight, she bore no trace of her long journey across Germany and
France. Strange how well French women travel! English women are always
tousled and tumbled after a night journey, but a French or Italian woman
never.

"_Au revoir_, m'sieur, till twelve at the Gare du Nord," she exclaimed,
with a merry smile and a bow as she drove away in a cab, leaving me upon
the kerb gazing after her and wondering.

Was she really a governess, as she pretended?

Her clothes, her manner, her smart chatter, her exquisite _chic_, all
revealed good breeding and a high station in life. There was no touch of
cheap shabbiness--or at least I could not detect it.

A few moments before twelve she alighted at the Gare du Nord and greeted
me merrily. Her face was slightly flushed, and I thought her hand
trembled as I took it. But together we walked to the train, wherein I
had already secured seats and places in the _wagon-restaurant_.

The railway officials, the controller of the train, the chief of the
restaurant, and other officials, recognising me, saluted, whereupon she
said:

"You seem very well known in Paris, m'sieur."

"I'm a constant traveller," I replied, with a laugh. "A little too
constant, perhaps. One gets wearied with such continual travel as I am
forced to undertake. I never know to-morrow where I may be, and I move
swiftly from one capital to another, never spending more than a day or
two in the same place."

"But it must be very pleasant to travel so much," she declared. "I would
love to be able to do so. I'm passionately fond of constant change."

Together we travelled to Calais, crossed to Dover, and that same evening
alighted at Victoria.

On our journey to London she gave me an address in the Vauxhall Bridge
Road, where, she said, a letter would find her. She refused to tell me
her destination, or to allow me to see her into a hansom. This latter