"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 fact caused me considerable reflection. Why had she so suddenly made up her mind to come to London, and why should I not know whither she went when she had told me so many details concerning herself?
Of one fact I felt quite convinced, namely, that she had lied to me. She was not a governess, as she pretended. Besides, I had been seized by suspicion that a tall, thin-faced, elderly man, rather shabbily dressed, whom I had noticed on the platform in Paris, had followed us. He had travelled second-class, and, on alighting at Victoria, had quickly made his way through the crowd until he lingered quite close to us as I wished her farewell.
His reappearance there recalled to me that he had watched us as we had walked up and down the platform of the Gare du Nord, and had appeared intensely interested in all our movements. Whether my pretty travelling companion noticed him I do not know. I, however, followed her as she walked out of the station carrying her dressing-bag, and saw the tall man striding after her. Adventurer was written upon the fellow's face. His grey moustache was upturned, and his keen grey eyes looked out from beneath shaggy brows, while his dark, thread-bare overcoat was tightly buttoned across his chest for greater warmth.
Without approaching her he stood back in the shadow and saw her enter a hansom in the station-yard and drive out into Buckingham Palace Road. It was clear that she was not going to the address she had given me, for she was driving in the opposite direction.