the other woman were watching him, stony and cold and tragic.
"Colette," he said softly. "Colette. . . . You must not. . . . You must be quiet." With a gentle strength he lifted her from the bed. "Colette, it is nearly dawn. . . . You must be discreet. There will be questions asked."
But she paid no heed. She was sobbing now, bitterly and without shame. "You must be discreet," he repeated.
"What difference does that make now? . . . It is nothing . . . less than nothing. . . ." And she fell to weeping once more.
He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, "There is the necessary business. You must not be seen here . . . like this."
But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. "I will take him to my house," she said, quietly. "You may come there. . . . You may stay there if you like. It is a big house . . . in the Rue Raynouard. . . . No one will ever know."
She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. "I will take care of things," she said. "I will stay here if you will arrange for the rest. I would like to stay . . . alone. It was good of you. . . . There is nothing I can say."
So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber. Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns and summer chairs piled high in the corners.
When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanation until now. She had come so near to being late . . . only a matter of a few hours, of
