, it was all that the most fastidious
could have required; a gem of Renaissance architecture in its turrets,
its quaint, scrolled windows, and the carving of its stone facade.
Age and romance breathed from every inch of it. For not less than four
hundred years it had watched the changing life of Paris; and even to
a lay person like myself a glance proclaimed it one of those ancestral
_hotels_, the pride of noble French families, about which many romantic
stories cling.

At another time it would have charmed me hugely, but to-day, as I stood
gazing, somehow, my spirits fell. Was it the almost sepulchral silence
of the place, the careful drawing of every shutter, the fact that the
grilled gateway leading to the court of honor was locked? I did not
know; I don't know yet; but I had an odd, eerie feeling. It seemed like
a place of waiting, of watching, and of gloom.

This was unreasonable; it was even down-right ridiculous. I began to
think that late events were throwing me off my base. "It's a house like
any other, and a jolly fine old one!" I assured myself, approaching the
grilled entrance and producing one of my cards.

An entirely modern electric button was installed there, beneath a now
merely ornamental knocker in grotesque gargoyle form. I pressed it,
peering through the iron latticework at the stately court. The answer
was prompt. Down the steps of the hotel came a white-headed majordomo,
gorgeously arrayed, and so pictorial that he might have been a family
retainer stepping from the pages of an old tale.

There was something queer about him, I thought, as he crossed the
courtyard; just as there was about the house, I appended doggedly, with
growing belief. His air was tremulous, his step slow, his gaze far-off
and anxious.

"For Miss Falconer, who waits for me," I announced in French, offering
him my card through the grille.

He bowed to me with the deference of a Latin, the grand manner of an
ambassador; but he made no motion to let me in.

"Mademoiselle," he replied, "sends all her excuses, all her regrets to
monsieur, but she leaves Paris within the hour and, therefore may not
receive."

I had feared it for a good sixty seconds. None the less, it was a blow
to me. My suspicions, never more than half laid, promptly raised their
heads again.

"Have the kindness," I requested, with a calm air of command that I had
known to prove hypnotic, "to convey my card to mademoiselle, and to say
that I beg of her