Part 82

"Certainly. I'll go to the washroom now, and get into the cellar somehow, and make myself acquainted with it.... I suppose I ought to have a candle----"

She said:

"When I walk home alone at night I have a little electric torch with me. Shall I lend it to you?"

She opened the desk drawer, drew it out concealed under her handkerchief, and he managed to transfer it to his pocket. It clinked against the loaded automatic pistol; nobody noticed the sound.

But for a moment he thought the two men, Meier and Hoffman, had noticed it, because they both got up and came over directly toward him.

However, they merely wished to pay their reckoning with a hundred-franc note, and Warner moved aside while they crowded before the pretty cashier's desk, offering hasty pleasantries and ponderous gallantries, while she dimpled at them and made change.

Then, after tipping the waiter, they went out into the late afternoon sunshine.

Warner, looking after them, could see that they were crossing the square toward the Boule d'Argent; and he knew that Halkett must have seen them and that he would manage to keep them in view.

Now was his time to investigate the cellar, and he said so to the brown-eyed girl behind the cage, who had been inspecting him rather pensively.

"I ought not to do this," said the pretty caissiere.

"Of course not. Otherwise we should not find each other agreeable."

She smiled, looking at him a little more seriously and more attentively.

"It is odd, is it not," she said under her breath, "how two people from the opposite ends of the earth chance to meet and--and find each other--agreeable?"

"It is delightful," he admitted smilingly.

"I don't even know your name," she remarked, playing with her pencil.

"James."

"Tchames?"--with a pretty attempt to imitate his English.

"Jim is easier."

"Djeem?"

"Perfect!"

"Djeem," she repeated, looking musingly at the tall, well-built American. "C'est drole, ce nom la! Djeem? It is pleasant, too.... My name is Jeanne." She shrugged her youthful shoulders. "Nothing extraordinary, you see.... Still, I shall try to please you, Monsieur Djeem."

"I dare not hope to please you----"

She laughed:

"You do please me. Do you suppose, otherwise, I should dare enter that frightful cellar?"

Under cover of her desk, she deftly detached a key from the bunch at her belt, covered it with her hand, palm down, and let it rest on the counter before him.

"Do you promise to keep away from the wine bins?" she asked lightly.

"I promise solemnly," he said, and took the key.

"Very well. Then you may go and look at this dreadful cellar at once. And when you behold it, ask yourself how great a goose a girl must be who ventures into it at ten o'clock at night merely because a young man desires to take a lesson in astronomy on the river Recollette."