he said. “Eh? Oh, pretty much the same, I think.”
“What hotel are you staying at?”
“The Normandie.”
Sally, dipping into the box for another chocolate cream, gave an imperceptible start. She, too, was staying at the Normandie. She presumed that her admirer was a recent arrival, for she had seen nothing of him at the hotel.
“The Normandie?” The dark man looked puzzled. “I know Roville pretty well by report, but I've never heard of any Hotel Normandie. Where is it?”
“It's a little shanty down near the station. Not much of a place. Still, it's cheap, and the cooking's all right.”
His companion's bewilderment increased.
“What on earth is a man like Scrymgeour doing there?” he said. Sally was conscious of an urgent desire to know more and more about the absent Scrymgeour. Constant repetition of his name had made him seem almost like an old friend. “If there's one thing he's fussy about...”
“There are at least eleven thousand things he's fussy about,” interrupted the red-haired young man disapprovingly. “Jumpy old blighter!”
“If there's one thing he's particular about, it's the sort of hotel he goes to. Ever since I've known him he has always wanted the best. I should have thought he would have gone to the Splendide.” He mused on this problem in a dissatisfied sort of way for a moment, then seemed to reconcile himself to the fact that a rich man's eccentricities must be humoured. “I'd like to see him again. Ask him if he will dine with me at the Splendide to-night. Say eight sharp.”
Sally, occupied with her dogs, whose numbers had now been augmented by a white terrier with a black patch over its left eye, could not see the young man's face: but his voice, when he replied, told her that something was wrong. There was a false airiness in it.
“Oh, Scrymgeour isn't in Roville.”
“No? Where is he?”
“Paris, I believe.”
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