He consented with entire good-nature--"As ever, irresistible, Liane!"--and found himself with the woman on his arm rounding the corner and moving toward Sixth avenue. "New York, by what appears, has the honour of entertaining you once again . . ."
"Proving the weakness of deductive reasoning," he observed. "When one saw you in a hired cab, one inferred you were merely a bird of passage."
"But I have never been away, monsieur, never since that luckless voyage landed us here last Spring. I find it amusing, this great town; as Paris is no more, alas! thanks to the War and the poor health of the franc. . . . As for that infamous taxicab, I ask you: what is one to do when one's own car is, as these quaint Americans put it, laid out?"
"Laid out or laid up--it is all the same."
"I believe you," Lanyard chuckled--"at my age, Liane."
He was aware, but seemed not to be, of sidelong scrutiny, keenly inquisitive.
"Is it that you begin to find yourself bored with this America, Michael?"
"The old life calls, eh?" (So she construed that equivoque as confirming her surmise; which argued an anxiety to do so. But why?) "You miss something, my friend, in this land where more things are verboten than in Germany before the War?"
"I miss my youth," Lanyard admitted with a rueful laugh--"those misspent years!"
"You would have them back?" she inquisitively demanded. "What for? To misspend them all over again?" He smiled illegibly; she laughed in impish glee. "I felt sure of it, when I thought of you today, Michael, I said to myself: By this time he will be well weary of this country of atrocious cookery, ice-water, and virtue with the indigestion."
"One has, it seems, friends of whose kind interest one was unaware."
"An idle little bird, if it finds no better gossip to twitter than the tale of my dull days."
"It is truly as I said!" She squeezed his arm. "You _are_ bored. So, then! a little patience and you will call it, as I do, a happy chance that threw me in your way tonight."
"Impossible that one should esteem it otherwise."
Lanyard smiled down at the woman, openly taking advantage of the illumination of a street lamp to study her.
In her day reputed the most beautiful demi-mondaine in Paris and the most dangerous, the old allure of her charms, by this tricky light at least, seemed unimpaired; while that she was still dangerous one had memories of events by no means stale to prove. And now what diablerie was she fostering behind that mask of fair, seductive flesh? what mischief had she in mind that required his co-operation?