That year winter had advanced with a delaying foot thus far across the
Belgian Ardennes, but this was the hour chosen by the icy king for the
beginning of his real siege of that region. Whilst Paul sat in his study
in the dark, the cold gathered about him tenser and more tense until he
was fain to seek the warmer shelter of his own room. There across the
gleaming darkness of the window-panes he could discern great broad
snowflakes loitering down one after the other as if intent on no
business in the world, and yet in spite of their seeming want of purpose
they had covered the earth six inches deep before daybreak.
He awoke in the morning to look out upon a world of virgin
white:--street, and roofs, and far-spread trees and fields all dazzling
in their winter cloak beneath a sky of cloudless blue, white towards the
horizon where it could catch the lustre of the up-beating brightness
of the snow. In the dark cold mornings of the year the hotel people
had fallen into a habit of bringing up his coffee and pistolet to his
bedroom. He had been willing enough to acquiesce in the custom; but
as he sat sipping and munching in dressing-gown and slippers, with a
travelling-rug about his knees, and revolving the events of last night
in his mind, he heard a noise in the stables, and, thrusting the
window open, looked out into the cold, still, clear air. Victor, the
shock-headed driver, was leading out a pair of flea-bitten grays already
accoutred for a journey, part of their harness dragging through the as
yet untrodden snow.
‘Holla!’ he called--‘Victor!’ The man looked up, knuckling at his
forehead. ‘Are they shooting to-day?’ Paul asked. ‘It ought to be a good
day for the trackers.’
‘No, monsieur,’ Victor answered; ‘it is Madame la Baronne who departs.
She takes the express to Verviers at half-past nine. Monsieur will
excuse; I am afraid of being late already.’
From the moment at which he had heard the horses moving down below,
he had anticipated this without wholly knowing to what he had looked
forward. He thrust aside with his foot the ice-cold tub in which it
was his custom to rejoice--as befitted an Englishman of his years--and,
hastily sponging his face and hands, made a hurried toilet, listening
meanwhile for any sound which might bring definite tidings to his mind.
When he descended the carriage was still at the main entrance to the
hotel, and Victor was pulling on to his chapped hands a huge pair of
sheepskin gloves, the wool worn inside.
‘We have but thirty-five minutes,’ the driver grumbled, ‘and two miles
to go, and all uphill.’
‘Is that a very awful task?’ Paul asked, for the mere sake of saying
something.
He was intent on retaining his name, and on saying farewell in such a
fashion that his manner should cast no reflection on the dear departing
divinity. Mademoiselle Adèle was already at the door, wiping her hands
upon her apron. Madame Alexis, the cook, was ranged up alongside,
and beyond her was the apple-cheeked Flamande maid One of the male
hangers-on of the establishment came stumbling down the staircase with
a great travelling-trunk upon his shoulders, and arranged his burden
alongside the driver’s seat. Then down tripped the Baroness’s maid,
carrying a dressing-bag in one hand and a despatch-box in the other.
Then followed a nondescript female who charred about the house and did
scullery-work, and sometimes, in a borrowed dress, served at table. She
came enveloped in rugs and furs, and at every note of preparation for
departure Paul’s heart beat faster. At last he could bear to look for
the last figure in the procession no longer, for he was bent on an
aspect of entire nonchalance, and the desolation of an actual farewell
struck more and more on his spirit as he waited.
At last the expected frou-frou, and the soft footfall of the
beautifully-shod feet, warned him of the Baroness’s coming.
She paused in the hall to say a gracious word here and there, and to
press something of evidently unexpected value into the hands of the
attendant trio, for they all curtseyed low, and said, as if awestricken,
‘Réellement, Madame la Baronne est trop bonne,’ as if their strings had
been mechanically pulled, and they had been trained to speak the words
in unison.
Paul dared not turn his head, but the gracious little figure paused in
passing him. Madame la Baronne was richly befurred and so thickly veiled
that he could discern nothing, or little, apart from the sparkling
brightness of her eyes. She sprinkled her adieux around her in French
to an accompaniment of thanks and curtsies, but she spoke to Paul in
English.
‘I am going to Venders,’ she said, ‘and I am afraid my studies will be
a little broken. In the meantime I will write to you and give you an
address, and I shall be glad if you will answer me.’
She held out her hand, and Paul held it for a mere instant, no
longer--he was careful of that--than the occasion would have demanded
had but the merest friendly acquaintance existed between them. He dared
not trust himself to speak, but he raised his hat and pressed the hand,
and the pressure was returned. Then the Baroness entered the carriage,
Victor cracked his whip impatiently, and the slow Flemish horses bowled
away, their hoof-beats silenced by the snow. They had reached the
corner, and in another instant would have been out of sight, when Paul
gave an artificial start, as if he had suddenly called to mind something
of importance, and dashed after the retreating carriage. He overtook it
easily enough, and, laying a hand upon it, ran alongside.
‘This is not good-bye?’ he said. ‘Tell me that this is not good-bye.’
‘I hope it is not good-bye,’ she answered. ‘But go now, dear heart, I
beg you; you know why I am going.’
The ‘dear heart’ thrilled him through and through.
‘You will write?’ he asked.
‘I will write to-night,’ she said, ‘but you must leave me now.’
He fell from the carriage side, and the vehicle went on its leisurely
course, leaving him standing in the snow and staring after it; but
recollecting himself in a moment, he turned and plodded slowly back to
the hotel, with as unconcerned and commonplace a look as he could summon
at short notice.
Annette had one of her old spells of secrecy, and was hidden all
day long. He was glad to miss her and to be left alone with his own
thoughts. He could not realize himself and he could not realize the
Baroness; her promised letter would, however, tell him something. It
might enable him at once to find his orient.
He passed through a strange day--a day of resentment and of tenderness,
a day of despair and of hope. He could not work or plan, and reading was
impossible, and to-morrow morning looked absurdly distant Yet it came at
last, after an almost sleepless night, in the course of which he heard
Annette moving and the occasional clink of glass. He could see a light
gleaming underneath her door half a dozen times, and these reminders
of her came to him always with a dull ache of wretchedness, yet he fell
asleep at last and overslept himself, so that he escaped the final hours
of waiting. The promised letter was to hand, and he tore its envelope
open with trembling fingers, not knowing what to expect within.
‘My very dear Friend’ (it began),
‘All day I have thought of you; I do not know what feeling has been
strongest in my mind. I make no secret of the esteem I have for you,
or of the sorrow I have felt at being forced to end the pleasantest
friendship I have ever known. I should not say to end it, for such a
companionship of spirit as we have experienced can never be ended, but
we must close the first chapter of the book, and the rest will not make
such happy reading. I have felt my heart ache more than once in the
contemplation of your unhappiness, for though you have never spoken of
it, I knew without the episode of last night--I have known almost from
the first--how profoundly you have suffered and will continue to suffer.
Ah, my dear friend, it is only those who have suffered in that way who
can truly sympathize with you. To have found a completer isolation in
the search for companionship--that is the tragedy of many souls. It is
yours, and I know it and feel it, because it is mine also.
‘I am weary with my journey, and I am so sad and lonely that I have
scarce the heart to write; but promise me just this one thing: Give me
half an hour of your thoughts each day, and let me know what part of
the day you choose, so that I may think of you at the same time. Do
you believe that any actual communion of the mind is possible in such
conditions? I should like to believe it. How pure, how spiritual, how
exquisite a friendship might exist if it were only so!’
Exactly. And what a quagmire a properly experienced lady may lead a
man into if she so wills! This particular experiment suggested by the
Baroness is singularly successful in the enslaving of the eager, and it
has the great merit of permitting the willing horse to do all the work.
The lover can moon and rhapsodise at a safe distance, and it makes not
a pennyworth of difference to him whether the mistress moons and
rhapsodises also, or whether she is engaged in a flirtation through
another telepathic line, or whether she has a score of different lines
converging upon her all at once.
Paul, of course, most willingly accorded the lady the daily half-hour
demanded. He became persuaded in a very little while that the soul of
Gertrude met his midway, and when she sent him a description of her
little boudoir, so that he might the better realize her in her own
surroundings, he used to float away to Verviers in vision, and sit by
Gertrude in fancy, and hold Gertrude’s hand, and express to Gertrude
all his ardours of friendship and esteem--for, of course, it never got
beyond that, or was ever to be permitted to get beyond it--and Gertrude
used to give him vow for vow, all in the range of the highest moral
feeling. It is possible that there are people who might imbibe this
sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it
remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in
a while he began to know that it was enervating. He began to rebel at
himself.
‘I am throwing away my manhood for a dream,’ he said.
For Gertrude, whose letters were fairly frequent and most sisterly
tender, would hear nothing of Paul’s petition that he might be allowed
to visit her--would not even listen to any suggestion that they might
ever meet again in any approach to the happy seclusion and privacy of
the first sweet days.
But Paul Armstrong was feeble in rebellion against himself, and he was
here caught firmly in the toils of the first passion of his manhood. The
May Gold episode and the Claudie Belmont episode had long been things to
laugh at. Marriage had turned out an unredeemed tragedy, which had never
had even the poor excuse of a passing infatuation behind it He had never
loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion.
And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful
brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind,
this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed
to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made
a clean end of the platonic theory so far as he was concerned. The
Baroness, at her end of the spirit-wire, appears to have been less
potently disturbed. Perhaps she took less pains to disturb herself;
possibly she took none whatever.
It came at last on Paul’s side to amount to something very like a
possession. Night and day his thoughts hovered about her. He would not
admit to his mind one dishonouring thought of her.
‘Charlotte was a married woman, and a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies would do nothing for to hurt her.’
And Gertrude was a married woman also, and Paul--who had not too rigidly
obeyed the precepts of morality in his day--was bent on honour in
this instance. He wrote reams of letters, all of which might have been
printed without harm to anybody; but by-and-by his passion began to
carry him off his feet, as passion has carried stronger men than he, and
the fever of his pulses got into his ink, and he began to make love, but
with a dreadful guardedness and a deadly fear lest he should offend
the susceptibilities of this creature of the skies. She rebuked him
by implication and in a parable. She had had a mournful letter from a
friend in Boston, an old and valued correspondent, a lady whose domestic
relations were of the saddest sort, who had long believed herself to
have established a pure and tender friendship with a person of the
opposite sex, and who had now been shocked and horrified beyond measure
by a proposal of elopement How rare a genuine friendship between men and
women seemed to be! How happy was she in the security she enjoyed in
the solidity of his character, in that delicacy of mind and heart which
permitted the most delightful intimacies of thought without danger. He
wrote back fiercely that he was unworthy of the confidence she reposed
in him, that he loved her passionately, adoringly, and without any dream
of hope.
‘I will not soil my worship of you by even asking for your forgiveness,’
so he wrote. ‘I have told you what I had to tell. There is no longer any
power in me to hide it And now I know that it is good-bye indeed. In the
sorrow and the loneliness which are rightly mine--since I earned them
with much foolish painstaking--I shall never cease to love you, but I
shall not presume to write to you again.’
‘My poor Paul,’ she wrote back to him, ‘what madness!
And how great a cruelty to snatch from me the solace of your friendship
‘Forget the madness, dearest friend. Undo the cruelty. Let us bury the
memory of this outburst, let us go back to the past. Alas! did ever man
or woman return to the past? But we must not part in this way. You must
write to me at times. You must let me know of your artistic hopes. You
must give me news of your career.’
He was amazed to find that he was answered at all, and even in his
misery he joyed to find himself reprieved from the sentence his own
conscience had passed upon him. He was still free to write, and he wrote
almost every day, though he sent off his budget only once a week. He did
not make love in the sense of seeking to persuade his goddess to descend
to him, but he made no further disguise of himself, and he was not again
reproved.
This all led to a long space of infertility, and it was stretched still
further by the departure of the Baroness to Paris. There, she wrote
Paul, she would be much in society, and if he should find himself in
the gay city at any time during her stay, she could introduce him to
charming and useful people. But she was very round in her warnings to
him.
‘You must not come,’ she told him, ‘unless you are absolutely sure that
there is no danger of making me absurd in the eyes of my friends. Dearly
as I esteem you, I should never forgive you that. You have been so
very outspoken of late, and I have permitted you to write your heart so
freely, that I should be guilty of the foolishest affectation if I were
silent on this one matter. We cannot control our affections. It is not
given to us to love and dislike at discretion, but we can control our
language and our conduct, and I must exact your promise ere you meet me.
And I will tell you this once, and I will never breathe it any more: Had
we met under happier conditions, had we both been free to choose, I know
that I could have loved you. I am thus candid with you because I wish
you to know how entirely I rely upon your discretion and respect. We
may have happiness denied us, and to choose it now would be to suffer
miserably, but we have each a personal esteem to guard. Ah, Paul! be
kind to me. Do not make it hard to see you again.’
If all this were written, as Paul came most devoutly to believe in later
days, with the single-minded desire to enslave him yet more completely,
it was truly heartless, but that was certainly the end it gained. It
seemed to him the most pathetic and womanly of effusions, for what woman
would write that she could have loved a man in happier conditions unless
she did truly love him? She suffered as he suffered. Without her warrant
it would have been coxcombical to believe it But the belief made her
altogether sacred in his eyes, and he vowed a thousand times that
no word or tone of his should ever offend that angel delicacy and
tenderness. A curious part of this maniac experience was his estimate of
himself as it proceeded. He was in a mood entirely heroical. The Baron
de Wyeth, who was making money to supply the most whimsical needs of the
absent Gertrude, never entered into his head. It did not offer itself on
any single occasion to his intelligence to think that there was anything
to be reprehended in this sterile dalliance.
As for Annette, she had grown to be impossible. She resented the
guardianship exercised over her with an increasing fierceness. When
she could smuggle her contraband through the enemy’s lines, she locked
herself in her room, and remained there until the supply was exhausted
She would emerge blotched, pale, and haggard, and companionship between
herself and her husband was out of question.
At the time at which the letter just cited reached Paul Annette’s
cunning had been unequal to the war for at least a fortnight, and her
constitution was still youthful and strong enough to enable her
to return to something of her earlier aspect after a few days of
abstinence.
‘I have business which will take me to Paris in a little while,’ her
husband told her.
‘Very well,’ she said indifferently.
‘Do you prefer to come with me, or to stay here?’ he asked.
‘To go with you?’ she demanded. ‘Under what conditions?’
‘Under the conditions I have always offered,’ he returned: ‘that you are
accompanied by a female companion of my choice.’
‘I shall stay here,’ Annette said curtly.
‘As you will.’
He was relieved by her decision, not merely because the last thread of
comradeship between them was broken, but because he dreaded the exposure
of the cupboard skeleton, which was always putting out a ghastly head at
him. In a great city like Paris there might arise an occasion of escape
from control at any moment, and Heaven alone knew what _esclandre_ might
ensue upon a single escapade.
He made his preparations for departure. Laurent promised his most
careful supervision of affairs, and Paul left him with plenary powers.
There were no adieux to make, for Annette declined to see him. He
travelled to Brussels, and thence to Paris, going away with a relief
which was made the more complete by the latest intelligence the doctor
had brought him: there was to be no child of Annette’s and his. That
hope or fear--and he had barely known which to think it--was over.
At Montcourtois Madame la Baronne de Wyeth had been content to live in
extreme simplicity, and her account of her own surroundings at Veryiers
did not express any dose approach to luxury; but in Paris she occupied
apartments of great splendour, had a considerable entourage about her,
and entertained a limited number of charming people, who were all more
or less celebrated. Her music was as fine as anything that could be got
in Paris, for she knew all the great singers and instrumentalists, and
though the season was about at an end, there was still enough genius in
the basket to pick and choose from.
It was with a wildly beating heart that Paul alighted at her door, and
as he stood awaiting her in the luxuriously furnished salon which was
the centrepiece of her apartments, his knees trembled with agitation.
He was there to meet for the first time the woman he loved. That was
strange and yet true. When he had last seen her he had not yet grown to
love her, or, if he had, he had granted himself no knowledge of it. But
now he loved, and he had confessed his love, and what was potentially
a return avowal had been made by her. And they were to meet just
as friends. There was to be no word spoken of all the passion which
thrilled and filled his heart and tingled through his veins.
She came at last in a gentle silken rustle, dressed already for the
reception of the guests who were expected to arrive an hour later. She
had accorded him this one _tête-à-tête_--this and no other. She was
transfigured in his eyes, and did indeed show to her best advantage in
full toilette. The lucent rosy whiteness of arms and shoulders seemed to
dazzle him.
He extended both hands to her, and she came forward with her lithe gait
and a smile of great sweetness, and took them in her own.
‘Gertrude!’ he whispered, and she answered with the one word ‘Paul!’ and
had his life depended upon it, he could not have spoken further at that
instant.
‘I am very glad to see you, Paul,’ she said, ‘very glad indeed.’ She
released one of his hands, and by the other led him to a causeuse near
one of the splendidly curtained windows. ‘But what has happened to you?
she asked. ‘My poor Paul, you are ill! You are not yourself at all.
There are brown circles round your eyes, and your cheeks have fallen in,
and you are growing positively gray at the temples.’
‘I am not ill,’ Paul answered, trying to smile. ‘I have had a somewhat
trying experience of late, and I am here to forget it.’
‘May I know of it?’ she asked
‘No,’ said Paul; ‘the topic is forbidden.’
She laughed gaily and blushed a little.
‘Now, that is very clever, and very wicked of you,’ she purred. ‘That
topic is not to be approached even elliptically. But really and truly,
my poor Paul, you are not well, and I shall see that you take proper
care of yourself. You will take a glass of wine at once.’
‘No,’ he said, waving a hand against her as she made a motion to rise.
‘You used not to contradict my orders,’ she told him, ‘and you shall not
do it now. I can give you a really excellent glass of champagne--not a
lady’s champagne, be it understood, a man’s wine--a connoisseur’s.’
He made no further protest, and she rang a small silver bell near her
hand. A grave serving-man appeared in answer to this summons, received
his mistress’s order, and glided away again.
‘I have all your news?’ the Baroness asked, turning to her guest again.
‘All,’ he answered--’ all there is to tell.’
He had known perfectly well at one time that she was not strictly a
beautiful woman. He had been able to analyze her, to admit very fine
eyes and teeth, and a clear, if somewhat florid, glow of complexion. He
had granted, further, fine hair, and very beautiful hands and arms. But
he wondered at himself, and could have laughed at his own blindness. The
power of analysis had gone out of him because he was in love. She was
merely a soft, dazzling splendour in aspect now, and every look and tone
and attitude was a witchery and a wonder.
‘I have not seen you in evening dress before to-night, Paul,’ she said.
‘I like you in evening dress. It is a great test of a man’s distinction.
It is cruel to all but the few. It is distinctly not cruel to you.’
‘I am proud to be approved of,’ he answered, trying to speak lightly.
The grave serving-man brought in the wine, which proved worthy of the
hostess’s praise. Paul was grateful for it, for it helped to steady his
shaken nerve. He felt pretty much as he imagined a man might feel who
was learning to stand under fire.
‘It was kind of you,’ he said, ‘to give me this one hour to myself. I
shall try to learn my lesson in it I want to assure you how much I have
laid your injunction to heart, and to promise you that from this time
forth you shall be implicitly obeyed. When I wrote that wild letter to
you at Venders I had not the faintest hope of your forgiveness. I need
not tell you how I thank you for it, how I shall strive to show my
gratitude. But, indeed, you are my Anthea, Gertrude, and may command me
anything.’
‘Another man would not have found forgiveness, Paul,’ she answered,
turning away her head, and looking downward. ‘I do not deny to you now
that I was deeply amazed, and, at first, humiliated. Then for a time
I was angry, and I had to ask myself of what indiscretion I had been
guilty to lay me open to the receipt of such a letter from my dearest
friend. But we women are weak creatures where the affections are
concerned, and I felt that I could not afford to lose you, Paul. You
will not make it necessary for me to lose you?’
‘No,’ he declared. ‘No spoken word of mine shall hurt you. God knows
what you have been to me since first I met you.’ She raised her hand
against him and looked up with a glance of appeal. ‘Oh, surely I may say
this!’ he urged. ‘I have been through dark days, Gertrude. I am young,
and reputation and fortune are calling to me, and I have put a millstone
about my neck, and but for your friendship I should have broken my
heart.’
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘my poor boy! My poor, dear boy! I think I would give
my life if I could comfort you.’
‘You do comfort me,’ he answered. ‘You are the one comfort I have. I
shall learn in time to think of you as if you were a saint in heaven.’
‘Oh!’ she purred, ‘you dear, simple-souled enthusiast! Don’t you know
yet--haven’t you found it out, that simple truth?--that when a man has
relegated a living woman to the position of a saint in heaven he has
ceased to care about her? I am not going to turn _you_ into a sanctified
figure.’
‘I should scarcely look for that,’ said Paul, with a momentary gleam of
humour.
‘I am going to keep you for a living, large-brained, human-hearted
friend, and I hope that if we do not see too much of each other, we may
both grow content with that arrangement.’
She spoke with a smiling vivacity, but she set a delicate little trifle
of lace and cambric to her eyes, and then looked up and smiled again.
‘You do not wish,’ he asked, ‘that we should see much of each other?’
His face was very gloomy.
‘I mean,’ she said gently, laying her hand upon his shoulder, and
looking into his mournful eyes, ‘that we should be discreet I do not
mean that at all as regards the opinion of others, for there I can trust
myself and you without a fear. I mean with respect to ourselves. It will
not be well for your own happiness that we should meet often as we are
meeting now.’
She rose, and moved away from him a little, standing with the fingers
of her hands interlaced, and the palms downward. This is a very pleasing
sort of attitude when adopted by the right kind of person. Taken in
conjunction with a pensive, sidelong droop of the head, it will yield
an expression of gently sorrowing coy confidence when employed by a
competent artist.
‘You will promise me,’ said the Baroness, with a voice not wholly
steady, ‘that you will never repeat to me what I am going to tell you.’
‘You may command me anything,’ Paul answered. ‘I promise.’
‘It will not be well,’ she went on, repeating the words she had spoken
so little a while before, ‘for your own happiness that we should meet
often as we are meeting now. Nor will it be well for mine, Paul. That
is why I have hesitated so long before I have dared to permit you to see
me--before I have dared to permit myself to see you. I am strong enough
now to trust myself, and I put faith, too, in your friendship and your
chivalry. You will not add to my unhappiness?’
Paul also had left his seat. He stood almost at her shoulder. He was
near enough to have taken her in his arms.
‘Gertrude,’ he murmured, ‘if anything could add to what I feel for you,
this would do it. You shall have my tenderest adoration, my constant
obedience.’
She turned her head slowly, as if she did it almost against her will.
She raised her eyes and looked at him with a strange steadfastness. She
spoke in a soft, half-whisper.
‘This is our good-bye to love. We have met and we have spoken, and we
part again. In half an hour we shall meet as friends, and never, never,
never again as we part now.’
She faced round upon him. Her fingers unlaced themselves and she stood
with both arms open to him. For one burning instant he held her.
‘Your promise!’ she whispered, in a frightened voice. ‘Your promise,
Paul! Your promise!’
He suffered her to escape, and she drew herself away lingeringly, with
the same strange steadfast glance.
‘Good-bye, my lover. Good-bye, my king. I shall never meet him again. I
shall come back to meet my friend.’
The words were but breathed so as to reach the ear, and she turned and
walked droopingly from the room. So might a bruised lily have been borne
away.
As for Paul, he had half an hour before the earliest guest was expected
to arrive, and he tried hard to compose himself. It was heavy work, for
he was constantly rolling down the hill of endeavour with exclamations
of wonder and worship. What a woman! What a pearl among women! What
candour! What courage! What tenderness! What purity! What beauty! He
was at the height of felicity and the depth of misery with such rapid
alternations that he lost the sense of difference, and could not
tell one from the other. But when the half-hour of waiting had almost
vanished he drank another glass of the wine his _déesse_ had commanded
for him, and was at least prepared to face the world with a pretence of
self-possession.
The guests began to arrive. There were but six more, and all were
masculine. The Baroness made a radiant entrance to greet them. She made
Paul known to each of them in turn, and all were men of mark. He heard
everywhere a name which had been long familiar to him, but the latest
comer of all, whom he had not found time to notice, was familiar in
something more than name. For it was Ralston--Ralston the great, who had
been the god of his boyhood--Ralston with his big gray head worn on one
shoulder or another, with the look of fighting wisdom in his face, quite
as of old.
‘Mr. Ralston,’ said the hostess, ‘you must know my young friend Mr.
Armstrong. We saw his comedy together, you remember.’
Ralston remembered, and seemed to remember more than the name.
‘We have met before this?’ he asked.
‘Once,’ Paul replied.
‘Castle Barfield?’
‘Exactly.’
‘If you’d rather shelve that----’
‘Certainly not--between ourselves.’
The hostess took the escort of the eminent diplomatist who was the
_doyen_ of the party. The men followed as it pleased them. Ralston and
Paul went last.
‘I am a prophet,’ said Ralston, subduing that richly hoarse voice of
his. ‘I told you you would do, and you have done.’