“That’s true,” Hanaud agreed. “You will go, then, to the big hotel in the Place Darcy. For me I shall stay in one that is more obscure, and not under my own name. Whatever chance of secrecy is still left for me, that I shall cling to.”
He did not volunteer the name of the obscure hotel or the name under which he proposed to masquerade, and Jim was careful not to inquire. Hanaud stood with his hand upon the knob of the door and his eyes thoughtfully resting upon Frobisher’s face.
“I will trust you with a little trick of mine,” he said, and a smile warmed and lit his face to good humour. “Do you like the pictures? No—yes? For me, I adore them. Wherever I go I snatch an hour for the cinema. I behold wonderful things and I behold them in the dark—so that while I watch I can talk quietly with a friend, and when the lights go up we are both gone, and only our empty bocks are left to show where we were sitting. The cinemas—yes! With their audiences which constantly change and new people coming in who sit plump down upon your lap because they cannot see an inch beyond their noses, the cinemas are useful, I tell you. But you will not betray my little secret?”
He ended with a laugh. Jim Frobisher’s spirits were quite revived by this renewal of Hanaud’s confidence. He felt with a curious elation that he had travelled a long way from the sedate dignities of Russell Square. He could not project in his mind any picture of Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt meeting a client in a dark corner of a cinema theatre off the Marylebone Road. Such manoeuvres were not amongst the firm’s methods, and Jim began to find the change exhilarating. Perhaps, after all, Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt were a little musty, he reflected. They missed—and he coined a phrase, he, Jim Frobisher! … they missed the ozone of police-work.
“Of course I’ll keep your secret,” he said with a thrill in his voice. “I should never have thought of so capital a meeting-place.”
“Good,” said Hanaud. “Then at nine o’clock each night, unless there is something serious to prevent me, I shall be sitting in the big hall of the Grande Taverne. The Grande Taverne is at the corner across the square from the railway station. You can’t mistake it. I shall be on the left-hand side of the hall and close up to the screen and at the edge near the billiard-room. Don’t look for me when the lights are raised, and if I am talking to anyone else, you will avoid me like poison. Is that understood?”
“Quite,” Jim returned.
“And you have now two secrets of mine to keep.” Hanaud’s face lost its smile. In some strange way it seemed to sharpen, the light-coloured eyes became very still and grave. “That also is understood, Monsieur Frobisher,” he said. “For I begin to think that we may both of us see strange things before we leave Dijon again for Paris.”
The moment of gravity passed. With a bow he held open the door. But Jim Frobisher, as he passed out into the corridor, was once again convinced that at some definite point in the interview Hanaud had at all events caught a glimpse of the flickering skirts of Chance, even if he had not grasped them in his hands.
IV
Betty Harlowe
Jim Frobisher reached Dijon that night at an hour too late for any visit, but at half-past nine on the next morning he turned with a thrill of excitement into the little street of Charles-Robert. This street was bordered upon one side, throughout its length, by a high garden wall above which great sycamores and chestnut trees rustled friendlily in a stir of wind. Towards the farther mouth of the street the wall was broken, first by the end of a house with a florid observation-window of the Renaissance period which overhung the footway; and again a little farther on by a pair of elaborate tall iron gates. Before these gates Jim came to a standstill. He gazed into the courtyard of the Maison Grenelle, and as he gazed his excitement died away and he felt a trifle ashamed of it. There seemed so little cause for excitement.
It was a hot, quiet, cloudless morning. On the left-hand side of the court women-servants were busy in front of a row of offices; at the end Jim caught glimpses of a chauffeur moving between a couple of cars in a garage, and heard him whistling gaily as he moved; on the right stretched the big house, its steep slate roof marked out gaily with huge diamond patterns of bright yellow, taking in the sunlight through all its open windows. The hall door under the horizontal glass fan stood open. One of the iron gates, too, was ajar. Even the sergent-de-ville in his white trousers out in the small street here seemed to be sheltering from the sun in the shadow of the high wall rather than exercising any real vigilance. It was impossible to believe, with all this pleasant evidence of normal life, that any threat was on that house or upon any of its inhabitants.
“And indeed there is no threat,” Jim reflected. “I have Hanaud’s word for it.”
He pushed the gate open and crossed to the front door. An old serving-man informed him that Mademoiselle Harlowe did not receive, but he took Jim’s card nevertheless, and knocked upon a door on the right of the big square hall. As he knocked, he opened the door; and from his position in the hall Jim looked right through a library to a window at the end and saw two figures silhouetted against the window, a man and a girl. The man was protesting, rather extravagantly both in word and gesture, to Jim’s Britannic mind, the girl laughing—a clear,
