'Suppose I call it Black and Red? Will that do?' he asked forlornly.
'It would do,' she answered; 'but it doesn't sound so well.'
'I've got it!' he cried exultantly. 'I've got it! The Plague-Spot. Monte Carlo the plague-spot of Europe, you know.'
'Splendid!' she said with enthusiasm. 'You are always magnificent at titles.'
And it was universally admitted that he was.
The book had been triumphantly finished, and the manuscript delivered to Macalistairs viâ Mark Snyder, and the huge cheque received under cover of a letter full of compliments on Henry's achievement. Macalistairs announced that their Magazine would shortly contain the opening chapters of Mr. Henry Shakspere Knight's great romance, The Plague-Spot, which would run for one year, and which combined a tremendous indictment of certain phases of modern life with an original love-story by turns idyllic and dramatic. Gordon's Monthly was serializing the novel in America. About this time, an interview with Henry, suggested by Sir Hugh Macalistair himself, appeared in an important daily paper. 'It is quite true,' said Henry in the interview, 'that I went to Monte Carlo to obtain first-hand material for my book. The stories of my breaking the bank there, however, are wildly exaggerated. Of course, I played a little, in order to be able to put myself in the place of my hero. I should explain that I was in Monte Carlo with my cousin, Mr. Dolbiac, the well-known sculptor and painter, who was painting portraits there. Mr. Dolbiac is very much at home in Parisian artistic society, and he happened to introduce me to a famous French lady singer who was in Monte Carlo at the time. This lady and I found ourselves playing at the same table. From time to time I put down her stakes for her; that was all. She certainly had an extraordinary run of luck, but the bank was actually broken at last by the united bets of a number of people. That is the whole story, and I'm afraid it is much less exciting and picturesque than the rumours which have been flying about. I have never seen the lady since that day.'
Then his marriage had filled the air.
At an early stage in the preparations for that event his mother and Aunt Annie became passive—ceased all activity. Perfect peace was maintained, but they withdrew. Fundamentally and absolutely, Geraldine's ideas were not theirs, and Geraldine did as she liked with Henry. Geraldine and Henry interrogated Mark Snyder as to the future. 'Shall we be justified in living at the rate of two thousand a year?' they asked him. 'Yes,' he said, 'and four times that!' He had just perused The Plague-Spot in manuscript. 'Let's make it three thousand, then,' said Geraldine to Henry. And she had planned the establishment of their home on that scale. Henry did not tell the ladies at Dawes Road that the rent of the flat was three hundred a year, and that the furniture had cost over a thousand, and that he was going to give Geraldine two hundred a year for dress. He feared apoplexy in his mother, and a nervous crisis in Aunt Annie.
The marriage took place in a church. It was not this that secretly pained Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie; all good Wesleyan Methodists marry themselves in church. What secretly pained them was the fact that Henry would not divulge, even to his own mother, the locality of the honeymoon. He did say that Geraldine had been bent upon Paris, and that he had completely barred Paris ('Quite right,' Aunt Annie remarked), but he would say no more. And so after the ceremony the self-conscious pair had disappeared for a fortnight into the unknown and the unknowable.
And now they had reappeared out of the unknown and the unknowable, and, with the help of four servants, meant to sustain life in Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie for a period of some five hours.