The girl sighed a little. "Still, Paris is Paris," she insisted.
"Rather!" he answered, sighing too. "Do you remember that afternoon in front of the Café de la Paix? We had _vin gris_ and watched the Frenchman with the funny dog, and the boys calling _La Presse_, and the woman who made you buy some 'North Wind' for me, and the people crowding around the newspaper kiosks."
In the adjoining room Nora was strumming the piano, and was now playing "_Un Peu d'Amour_." She had looked in the hall and finding the stranger so wholly absorbed in Ethel Cartwright, had retired to solitude.
"And do you remember the hole in the table-cloth?" Ethel demanded.
"And wasn't it a dirty table-cloth?" he reminded her. "And afterwards we had tea in the Bois at the Cascade and the Hungarian Band played '_Un Peu d'Amour_.'" He looked at the girl smiling. "How did you arrange to have that played just at the right moment?"
They listened in silence for a moment to the dainty melody, and then she hummed a few bars of it. Her thoughts were evidently far away from Long Island.
"And don't you remember that poor skinny horse in our fiacre?" she asked him. "He was so tired he fell down, and we walked home in pity."
"Ah, you were tender-hearted," he sighed.
"And we had dinner at Vian's afterwards," she reminded him, and then, after a pause: "Wasn't the soup awful?"
"Ah, but the string-beans were an event," he asserted. "And that evening, I remember, there was a moon over the Bois, and we sat under the trees. Have you forgotten that?"
"I don't think that would be very easy," she said softly.
"And we went through the Louvre the next day," he said eagerly, "the whole Louvre in an hour, and the loveliest picture I saw there was--_you_."
Denby glanced up with a frown as Lambart's gentle footfall was heard, and rose to his feet a trifle embarrassed by this intrusion. Lambart came to a respectful pause at Miss Cartwright's side.
"Pardon me," he said, "but there is a gentleman to see you." She took a card that was on the tray he held before her.
"To see me?" she cried, startled, gazing at the card. Denby, watching her closely, saw her grow, as he thought, pale. "Ask him to come in. Mr. Denby," she said, "will you forgive me?"