“No,” he declared hastily. “I’m sorry, Molly, but I must go. I promised. There’s to be somebody there that I must meet.”
“Who?”
“Well, it’s a sort of secret. You won’t talk about it?”
“Who have I got to talk to?”
The retort struck painfully on Alistair. That compassion for Molly which lay at the root of his refusal to leave her was stirred by the reminder of the poor little woman’s loneliness. She had no friends, she could have no friends in their present circumstances, and she had no interests in life apart from him. He felt that he was ill-treating her by this second absence in one day, and his voice softened as he explained:
“It’s Don Juan. Des Louvres told me he doesn’t want it to be known that he’s in England.”
The name was not familiar to Molly.
“Who is he?” she asked, more with the object of detaining Stuart than from any real curiosity on the subject.
Don Juan, in fact, only ranked as an heir-apparent in the Legitimist almanac, his father being still alive. He represented one of those families of decrepit and priest-ridden despots which were everywhere driven from the thrones of the Mediterranean by the great Liberal flood of the nineteenth century. Now the flood was beginning to abate, the wrongs of the past were fading from men’s minds, and the figures of these discrowned Princes stood forth once more, surrounded by the halo of romantic misfortune.
But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from herself.