They talked gaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling boots and the other incomprehensible noises of the night.

Through the flimsy partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that is so impossible to attain.

It reminded me of the voices of the two men at the Opera.

I began to wonder what they had been saying--what they could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little correspondent to interfere.

Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern--a clearness from which one cannot take one's eyes.
It threw everything--the whole world--into more unpleasant relations with me than even the Greenland affair.