felt the stillness of the old town around him, and heard again the vast, sweet thronging of the cathedral bells through the dark and silent air, and felt again, as he had felt so many times, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And there was something in his heart he could not utter.
When he went downstairs again, he found the old woman waiting for him, with an eager and cunning gleam at once comical and pathetic in her sharp old eyes, and a great book of newspaper clippings in her arms.
With an air of complete possession, she took him by the arm, and thus linked, they entered the hotel restaurant together. As they went in, it was at once evident that the fame of the young journalist had preceded him. There was a great scraping of chairs around the family table and Madame Vatel, her husband, their comely married daughter, and the daughter’s little girl, rose from the family soup in unison, and received him with a chorus of smiles, bows, and enchanted murmurs of greeting that alarmed him by their profuse respectfulness, and that became almost fawningly obsequious as the Countess began to publish the merits of his power and influence in a torrential French of which he could only capture occasional glittering fragments, the chief of which was the proud name of The New York Times—“le grand journal américain.”
Then, having muttered out a few desperate words of thanks for the overwhelming and unexpected warmth of their reception, he and the Countess were escorted by a bowing waiter to the table which had been prepared for them at the other end of the restaurant, near the street entrance. The food—a savoury and wholesome country soup, broiled fish, succulent thick slices of roast beef, tender, red, and juicy as none he had ever tasted before, a crisp and tender salad of endive, and camembert and coffee—was as delicious as the Countess had predicted; the wine—a Beaujolais, of which the old woman drank half a glass—both cheap and good; the service of the old waiter, suave, benevolent, and almost unctuously attentive; and his own mixed feelings of alarm, astonishment, embarrassment at the position in which he had been placed, resentment at the imposture into which the old woman had compelled him, and wild, helpless, mounting, and astounded laughter—were explosive, indescribable.
He would look up uneasily from the delicious food to see the Vatel family, heads together around their table in a congress of whispering secrecy, and with the imprint of conspiratorial
