The staircase had a crimson carpet. Mr. Blunt appeared from
somewhere in the hall. He was in riding breeches and a black coat
with ample square skirts. This get-up suited him but it also
changed him extremely by doing away with the effect of flexible
slimness he produced in his evening clothes. He looked to me not
at all himself but rather like a brother of the man who had been
talking to us the night before. He carried about him a delicate
perfume of scented soap. He gave us a flash of his white teeth and
said:

"It's a perfect nuisance. We have just dismounted. I will have to
lunch as I am. A lifelong habit of beginning her day on horseback.
She pretends she is unwell unless she does. I daresay, when one
thinks there has been hardly a day for five or six years that she
didn't begin with a ride. That's the reason she is always rushing
away from Paris where she can't go out in the morning alone. Here,
of course, it's different. And as I, too, am a stranger here I can
go out with her. Not that I particularly care to do it."

These last words were addressed to Mills specially, with the
addition of a mumbled remark: "It's a confounded position." Then
calmly to me with a swift smile: "We have been talking of you this
morning. You are expected with impatience."

"Thank you very much," I said, "but I can't help asking myself what
I am doing here."

The upward cast in the eyes of Mills who was facing the staircase
made us both, Blunt and I, turn round. The woman of whom I had
heard so much, in a sort of way in which I had never heard a woman