"I think I should have told him," remarked Louis slowly; the story seemed to have strangely moved him. "If he really loved her he'd have worn green spectacles and taken her as she was--I would. Bad business, this separating lovers."
"No, you wouldn't, Louis," remarked Herbert, "if you'd ever seen her neck. I know something of that tattoo, although mine was voluntary, and only covered a part of my arm. Madame did just right. There are times when one must tell anything but the truth."
Everybody looked at the speaker in astonishment. Of all men in the world he kept closest to the exact hair-line; indeed, one of Herbert's peculiarities, as I have said, was his always understating rather than overstating a fact.
"Yes," he continued, "the only way out is to 'lie like a gentleman,' as the saying is, and be done with it. I've been through it myself and know. Your story, madame, has brought it all back to me."
"It's about a girl, of course," remarked Louis, flashing a smile around the circle, "and your best girl, of course. Have a drop of cognac, old man," and he filled Herbert's tiny glass. "It may help you tell the _whole_ truth before you get through."
"No," returned Herbert calmly, pushing the cognac from him, a peculiar tenderness in his voice; "not my best girl, Louis, but a gray-haired woman of sixty--one I shall never forget."
Madame laid her hand quickly on Herbert's arm; she had caught the note in his voice.
"Oh! I'm so glad!" she said. "I love stories of old women; I always have. Please go on."
"If I could have made her young again, madame, you would perhaps have liked my story better."
"Yes and no. It is not, I must say, exactly an after-dinner story, and but that it illustrates precisely how difficult it is sometimes to speak the truth, I would not tell it at all. Shall I go on?"
"Yes, please do," she pleaded, a tremor now in her own voice. It was astonishing how simple and girlish she could be when her sympathies were aroused.
"My gray-haired woman had an only son, a man but a few years younger than myself, a member of my own party, who had died some miles from our camp at Bangala, and it accordingly devolved upon me not only to notify his people of his death, but to forward to them the few trinkets and things he had left behind. As I was so soon to return to London I wrote his people that I would bring them with me.