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.