CHAPTER VII
W HEN Martin returned to the hotel a couple of hours later, he found that Monsieur Camille Fargot had departed, and that Corinna had entrenched herself in her room. On the wane of the afternoon she sent word to any whom it might concern that, not being hungry, she would not come down for dinner. To Félise, anxious concerning her health, she denied access. Offers of comforting nourishment on a tray made on the outer side of the closed door she curtly declined. Mystery enveloped the visit of Camille Fargot.
Martin learned from a perturbed Bigourdin that she had descended immediately after he had left the vestibule and had led Fargot at once into the Salon de Lecture, a moth-eaten and fusty cubby-hole in which commercial travellers who found morbid pleasure in the early stages
