Fanshawe detained her in the dining-room while he ate his lunch. He had had enough of solitude during the last few years. She gossiped with him readily enough about all manner of past acquaintance and happenings, but was reticent on the one subject that interested him at the moment. Once, in a pause in the conversation, she remarked suddenly and apropos of nothing in particular: “Without doubt, mademoiselle will have many things to tell her father.”

“Evidemment,” said Fanshawe in curt agreement, and did not pursue the matter further.

The meal over, he returned to the salon, there to smoke and drink the excellent coffee which Eléonore brought him. Tired as he was, he would have slept in his chair, if some part of his consciousness had not remained ceaselessly on the alert, listening for the sound of the front door opening. The lines in his face grew deeper as he waited, and the expression of patient disillusionment more marked.

It was not long before he heard the unmistakable sound of a key being fitted to the door. He rose and took a step towards the hall, then as he heard footsteps hurrying from the interior of the house, returned quietly to his chair. So Eléonore had been on the watch too! The sounds of a whispered colloquy on the doorstep came to his ears, and without hearing what was being said, he realized that for some reason she found it necessary to break the news of his arrival to her mistress. The delay was but a short one, but it seemed long enough to Fanshawe before the door was flung open, and with a cry of “Father!” his daughter was in his arms again.

She quickly broke away from his embrace, and held him at arm’s length so that she could see his face, murmuring broken little phrases of concern at his pallor and grey hairs. He on his side looked at her narrowly. She too had changed, he remarked. She had lost some of the girlish charm that he remembered, but in its place had gained the poise and good looks of mature womanhood. “Just the type to attract a Frenchman,” he said to himself. Just now her cheeks were flushed, and there was an expression in her eyes which caused him to raise his brows in a mute question.

She noticed it, and by way of answer drew a little further away from him. “I didn’t think you would be—be free for another week,” she murmured. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I gathered so much from Eléonore.”

“Then you didn’t get my letter?”

“Evidently not, since I am here. That is, I presume that the letter was to tell me not to come?”

She looked away, in evident distress.

“Father—this is so horribly difficult. . . .”

“Not at all.” Fanshawe’s dry, unemotional tones were not unkindly. “I am in the way here. That isn’t very surprising, is it?”