For half an hour or more, Barres fussed and pottered about in the rather aimless manner of all artists, shifting canvases and stacking them against the wall, twirling his wax Arethusa around to inspect her from every possible and impossible angle, using clouds of fixitive on such charcoal studies as required it, scraping away meditatively at a too long neglected palette.
He was already frankly concerned about Thessalie, and the more he considered her situation the keener grew his apprehension.
Yet he, like all his fellow Americans, had not yet actually persuaded himself to believe in spies.
Of course he read about them and their machinations in the daily papers; the spy scare was already well developed in New York; yet, to him and to the great majority of his fellow countrymen, people who made a profession of such a dramatic business seemed unreal--abstract types, not concrete examples of the human race--and he could not believe in them--could neither visualise such people nor realise that they existed outside melodrama or the covers of a best-seller.
There is an incredulity which knows yet refuses to believe in its own knowledge. It is very American and it represented the paradoxical state of mind of this deeply worried young man, as he stood there in the studio, scraping away mechanically at his crusted palette.
Then, as he turned to lay it aside, through the open studio door he saw a strange, bespectacled man looking in at him intently.
An unpleasant shock passed through him, and his instinct started him toward the open door to close it.
"Excuse," said he of the thick spectacles; and Barres stopped short:
The man, who was well dressed and powerfully built, squinted through his spectacles out of little, inflamed and pig-like eyes.
"Miss Dunois iss here?" he enquired politely. "I haff a message----"
"Excuse, please. My name iss not personally known to Miss Dunois----"
"Then what is your business with Miss Dunois?"
"Excuse, please. It iss of a delicacy--of a nature quite private, iff you please."
Barres inspected him in hostile silence for a moment, then came to a swift conclusion.
"Very well. Step inside," he said briefly.
Startled into silence, the man only blinked at him. Under the other's searching, suspicious gaze, the small, pig-like eyes were now shifting uneasily; then, as Barres took an abrupt step forward, the man shrank away and stammered out something about a letter which he was to deliver to Miss Dunois in private.