Paul Ravenel smiled.
“Marguerite never knew I was there. I was always afraid that she would come there by chance. Fortunately, she was driving a car. I was just Ahmed Ben Larti. The time had not come.” He looked at Gerard and nodded his head. “But I can tell you it was difficult not to send for her. There she was, just a few streets and just a few house-walls between us. There were sleepless nights, with the light shining down on all those beds of wounded men when I could have screamed for Marguerite aloud.”
He sent off his telegram from the Cantonment Post Office and then strolled into the town with Gerard de Montignac. The Villa Iris was closed; Madame Delagrange had vanished. Petras Tetarnis was no doubt driving his Delaunay-Belleville through the streets of Paris. Paul looked at his watch and put it back into his pocket with impatience. It was out in the palm of his hand again. He was counting the minutes until a telegram could be delivered in Marseilles. He was wondering whether she was already aware—as she had been aware when he had stood behind her on the first night that they met.
A fortnight later Mr. Ferguson, the lawyer, received a telegram which put him into a fluster. He was an old gentleman nowadays and liable to excitement. He sent for his head clerk, not that pertinacious servant, Mr. Gregory—he had long since gone into retirement—but another, from whom Mr. Ferguson was not inclined to stand any nonsense.
“I shall want to-morrow all the necessary forms for securing English nationality,” he said, “and please get me Colonel Vanderfelt on the trunk line.”
The clerk went out of the office. The old man sat in a muse, looking out of the window upon the plane trees in the Square. So here was Virginia Ravenel’s son coming home, invalided, with a wife. How the years did fly, to be sure! Yet though the plane trees were a little dim to his eyes, he heard a voice, fresh as the morning, through that dusty room, and saw the Opera House at Covent Garden with people wearing the strange dress of thirty years ago.
THE END