“I gave a supper to her in Trouville last night,” said the Englishman. “And she plays at the Casino Theatre to-night.”
Gerald was repulsed but not defeated. “What is she playing in to-night? Tell me that!” he sneered.
“I don’t see why I sh’d tell you.”
“Hm!” Gerald retorted. “If what you say is true, it’s a very strange thing I should have seen her in the Champs Elysees to-night, isn’t it?”
The Englishman drank more wine. “If you want to insult me, sir—” he began coldly.
“Gerald!” Sophia urged in a whisper.
“Be quiet!” Gerald snapped.
A fiddler in fancy costume plunged into the restaurant at that moment and began to play wildly. The shock of his strange advent momentarily silenced the quarrel; but soon it leaped up again, under the shelter of the noisy music,—the common, tedious, tippler’s quarrel. It rose higher and higher. The fiddler looked askance at it over his fiddle. Chirac cautiously observed it. Instead of attending to the music, the festal company attended to the quarrel. Three waiters in a group watched it with an impartial sporting interest. The English voices grew more menacing.
Then suddenly the whiskered Englishman, jerking his head towards the door, said more quietly:
“Hadn’t we better settle thish outside?”