"Puss, I know what you're thinking about--it's that popgun man."
"Rather inconsequent, isn't it? You wouldn't average Mr. Faber?"
"No, I suppose he's clever enough. He makes money. Old Baker, our head at school, always used to say that the faculty of making money was one of the most contemptible. But it's useful, I admit."
"Oh, yes, we all admit that, and show our contempt of the faculty by worshipping the possessor."
"Collectively, yes; individually, not at all."
"I suppose you had a jolly time with him in Paris?"
"Oh, my dear Harry, what next? I saw him twice: once in the corridor of the hotel, then in his own rooms."
"Yes; to tell him I never wished to see him again."
"Oh, you brick; that's the best thing I've heard. Of course, I knew you would. There's never been anything said, but you owed that to me--now, didn't you, puss?"
She would not answer him. They passed to the vague intimacies of an incomplete amour, in which their whispers were inaudible and the sound of voices in the cabin a warning discord. Eva still played an intolerable waltz. The harbour waves sported about the dinghy, tethered astern. Gabrielle wondered why it was that she was incapable of resisting all this; that she suffered this quite brainless boy to kiss her at his pleasure--a great bear with fearsome limbs cuddling her. Was it because of her twenty-three years of Suburbia? Because of an inherited instinct for the commonplace of the natural life--such a life as all about her lived, and would live in that little world of Hampstead? Or was it purely the call of sex--more potent than a thousand theories, imperious beyond all the laws of emperors and kings?
The latter thought did not occur to her. She suffered the spell of the scene, the soft airs of night, the shining stars, the harbour lights, the waxing and waning chords of distant music. Harry's passionate whispers were like a message from afar. She submitted to him as though thus was her destiny written.
Do you know Ragusa--Ragusa, the Pearl of the Adriatic?
It was here that the Imperial yacht carried the Emperor when at last he sailed from Trieste--here that John Faber saw him within three hours of his going ashore.
Here also Faber found the man he had sought so many years. Louis de Paleologue, who had taken his mother to America after his father's death in Paris.