“Will you remain in Paris with a mind equally serene?” Lucilla asked, her deep grey eyes examining his face, which he had vainly endeavoured to compose into its habitual aspect of detached benevolence. He met her glance.
“The derelict,” said he, “is a thing of no account. But it is better that it should not lie in the course of the young and living ship.”
Lucilla put her hands behind her back and sat on the corner of an old Venetian table. And she still looked at him, profoundly interested. Here was a Fortinbras she had never met before, a broken man, far removed from the shrewd and unctuous _marchand de bonheur_ of the Latin Quarter with his rolling periods and opportunist philosophy.
“There’s something behind all this,” she remarked. “If I’m to be any good, I ought to know.”
He recovered a little and smiled. “Your perspicacity does credit to your country,” said he. “Also to your sex. There is much behind it. An unbridgeable gulf of human sorrow. Remember that, should my little girl be led away—which I very much doubt—to talk to you of most unhappy things. She only came to the edge of the gulf half an hour ago. The marriage matter is but a thistledown of care.”
“I more or less see,” said Lucilla. “The vulture’s perch overhangs the gulf. Right. Now what do you want me to do?”
“Just keep her until I can find a way to send her back to Brantôme.”
Lucilla raised a hand, and reflected for a few seconds. Then she said: “I’ll run her down there myself in the car.”
“That is most kind of you,” replied Fortinbras, “but Brantôme is not Versailles. It is nearly three hundred miles away.”
“Well? What of that? I suppose I can commandeer enough gasoline in France to take me three hundred miles. Besides, I am due the end of next week, anyway, to stay with some friends at Cap Martin, before going to Egypt. I’ll start a day or two earlier and drop Félise on my way. Will that suit you?”
“But, again, Brantôme is not on your direct route to Monte Carlo,” he objected.
She slid to her feet and laughed. “Do you want me to be a young mother to your little girl, or don’t you?”
“Then don’t conjure up lions in the path. See here,” she touched his sleeve. “You were a good friend to me once when I had that poor little fool Effie James on my hands—I shouldn’t have pulled her through without you—and you wouldn’t accept more than your ridiculous fee—and now I’ve got a chance of shewing you how much I appreciate what you did. I don’t know what the trouble is, and now I don’t want to know. But you’re my friend, and so is your daughter.”