Miss Althea Jakes was tired after her long journey from Basle.

It was a brilliant summer afternoon, and though the shutters were half closed on the beating Parisian sunlight, the hotel sitting-room looked, in its brightness, hardly shadowed.

Unpinning her hat, laying it on the table beside her, passing her hands over the undisordered folds of her hair, Miss Jakes looked about her at the old-gold brocade of the furniture, the many mirrors in ornate gold frames, the photographs from Bougereau, the long, crisp lace curtains.

It was the same sitting-room that she had had last year, the same that she had had the year before last--the same, indeed, to which she had been conducted on her first stay at the Hotel Talleyrand, eight years ago.

The brocade looked as new, the gilded frames as glittering, the lace curtains as snowy as ever.