“The alternative is for you to choose.”
It was then that I began to contemplate seriously the course of remaining in the house for the night. I should at least gain time; and time might bring a solution.
“It is a dainty prison, but still a prison, although the bars are invisible, and the gaoler yourself. You realize the responsibility of what you are doing?”
“I am prepared to face any responsibility, and you would be my most honoured guest.”
She spoke very seriously, but there was a light in her eyes that told not only of triumph, but of laughter scarcely restrained. For all the seriousness behind the position, she saw the humour of it and enjoyed it. And so in truth did I; for nothing on earth would have pleased me better than to be in her company for any number of days, if I could only have divested myself of my confounded Imperial character. If she could have read my thoughts, what would her own have been!
I had to keep up the farce of assumed disinclination, however, and was meditating the best line to take when an interruption came.
The door was opened, and a servant announced—“M. Paul Drexel.”
A flush of extreme annoyance mounted to Helga’s face at the entrance of the new-comer, who was the reverse of a pleasant-looking man. He was about forty years of age; short, broad-shouldered, inclined to corpulence, awkward and ungainly in figure. His features were coarse and Jewish in character; he had beady, twinkling, stealthy eyes, and his manner suggested a mixture of truculence and cunning.
Altogether he looked entirely out of place in Helga’s drawing-room, and I wondered what on earth could have brought him there, a wonderment which became genuine astonishment when he advanced with as much confidence as if he were the master of the house, and said in Russian—
“Good-evening, Helga. You see I have come after all. Is this the company you said would engage you?” He turned to me with a questioning, half suspicious, and rather insolent glance.