“For Carola Venitequa,
With thanks for having shown the stranger into my room, and begging her never to set her foot in it again.”
He folded the paper and slipped it into the box in which the trinkets were packed.
“No precipitation!” he said to himself as he was on the point of handing the box to the porter. “I’ll pass one more night under this roof. For this evening let’s be satisfied with locking Miss Carola out.”
VI
The moral law which Descartes considered provisional, but to which he submitted in the meantime, until he had established the rules that should regulate his life and conduct hereafter, was the same law—its provisional powers indefinitely protracted—which governed Julius de Baraglioul.
But Julius’s temperament was not so intractable nor his intellect so commanding as to have given him hitherto much trouble in conforming to the proprieties. On the whole all that he demanded of life was his comfort—part of which consisted in his being successful as a man of letters. The failure of his last novel was the first experience of his life which had ever really galled him.
He had been not a little mortified at being refused admittance to his father; he would have been much more so if he had known who it was who had forestalled him. On his way back to the Rue de Verneuil, it was with less and less conviction that he repelled the importunate supposition which had assailed him as he went to visit Lafcadio in the morning. He too had juxtaposed facts and dates; he too was obliged to recognise in this strange conjunction something more than a mere coincidence. Lafcadio’s youthful grace, moreover, had captivated him, and though he suspected his father was going to cheat him of a portion of his patrimony for the sake of this bastard brother, he felt no ill will towards him; he was even expecting him this morning with a curiosity that was almost tender in its solicitude.
As for Lafcadio, shy of approach and reticent though he was, this rare opportunity of speaking tempted him—and also the pleasure of making Julius feel a little uncomfortable. For he had never taken even Protos very deeply into his confidence. And how far he had travelled since then! After all he did not dislike Julius—absurd and shadowy though he thought him. It amused him to know that they were brothers.
As he was on his way to Julius’s house, the morning after his visit, a somewhat curious adventure befell him.