She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
"Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is the injury
for me--my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask
who I am--l assure you I don't in the least mind. Here, however,"
she continued, "is my card, and as I find there's something else
again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the
moment I leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she
had extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another
from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read
thus the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached,
in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street,
presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its
foreignness. He put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his
own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the door-post
he met with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before
the hotel offered to his view. It was positively droll to him that
he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was--of which he
hadn't really the least idea--in a place of safe keeping. He had
somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little
token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes
as he followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself
if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was
prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little doubt
of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a
certain person. But if it was "wrong"--why then he had better not
have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already--and even
before meeting Waymarsh--arrived. He had believed he had a limit,
but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how