For the vicar, Spence prescribed a _vermouth sec_; Gortre, a courtesy invalid, was given a minute glass of an amber-coloured liquid with quinine in it--"_Dubonnet_" Spence called it; and Helena had a _sirop_ of _menthe_.
They were all very happy together in the simple-minded, almost childish, way of quiet, intellectual people. Their enjoyment of the novel liqueurs, in a small _café_ at tourist-haunted Dieppe, was as great as that of any sybarite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, or at a rare dinner at Ciro's in Monte Carlo.
The vicar seemed slightly perturbed. "Isn't that stuff rather dangerous, Spence?" he said, shrinking a little from the glass when the waiter brought it. "I've heard terrible things of it."
"Oh, I know," said the journalist, laughing, "people call it the French national vice and write tirades against it. Of course if it becomes a regular habit it is dangerous, and excess in absinthe is worse than most things. But one glass taken now and again is a wonderful stomachic and positively beneficial. I take one, perhaps, five times in a year and like it. But, like all good things, it is terribly abused both by the people who use it and those who don't."
"Oh, look, Basil!" she said. "There is our friend of the Plage--Quinbus Flestrin, the mountain of flesh, you remember your Swift?"
The big stranger, now in evening dress and a heavy fur coat, had just come into the _café_ and was sitting there with a cigarette and a Paris paper. He seemed lost in some sort of anxious speculation--at least so it seemed by the drooping of the journal in his massive fingers and the set expression of abstraction which lingered in his eyes and spread a veil over his countenance.
They had all turned at Helena's exclamation and looked towards the other side of the _café_, where the man was sitting.
"Why, that's Sir Robert Llwellyn," said Spence.
The vicar looked up eagerly. "The great authority on the antiquities of the Holy Land?" he said.
"Yes, that's the man. They knighted him the other day. He's supposed to be the greatest living authority, you know."
"Do you know him, then?" asked the vicar.
"Oh, yes," said Spence, carelessly. "One knows every one in my trade. I have to. I've often gone to him for information when anything very special has been discovered. And I've met him in clubs and at lectures or at first nights at the theatre. He is a great play-goer."