“I promise you, as I promised you before,” said Marion, “that I will communicate with you the very moment that a present difficulty has resolved itself. Only, for mercy’s sake, don’t again risk disaster through this sort of collusion. It will be bad for you, for us all, if his suspicions are once aroused. Felix, I will tell you one thing—it is for your companion’s sake. He knows—I have ascertained it—that we alighted near the Mont de Piété that night. That is enough to put his agents on the scent; and you must keep her close, if you would not imperil her safety. If she were once traced, and found to be——” She checked herself, gulped, and went on—“you would not like to have her innocent blood on your head, I am sure?”
I stared. It was not her persistent reassertion of that wild fable which surprised me; it was the curiously detached manner of her reference to my “companion.” Was it really Fifine’s salvation or her father’s which formed my sister’s leading consideration in this matter? The question was a novel and startling one. Really, if it had not been Marion, I should have suspected here some interest more than exorcismal in the morphiomaniac.
“By no means,” I answered—“nor the miscarriage of your plans either. Which means, I suppose, that I must resign myself to the inevitable.”
“If you will only have patience, Felix. It will not be for long now, I hope.”
“And in the meantime—h’m!” I stood considering. Then suddenly a whimsical thought occurred to me; and I uttered it, more for the humour of the shocked protest it would evoke, than from any least expectation of a favourable response.
“I suppose you wouldn’t at all approve of our going a trip together?”
“A trip!” She was obviously and naturally startled; but her tone, I thought, betrayed no particular moral alarm.
“She was born, she tells me, in Provence,” I said, “and her journey thence to Paris sums up her travelling experience. It is odd; but I suppose these exotics of the pur sang must be kept under cover. Anyhow it struck me that it might not only interest her to visit her birthplace, but that it would be a way for us both out of the killing confinement and monotony of our present existence.”
Marion was listening to me; yet I could see that some reflection beyond that engendered by my proposal was exercising her mind.
“She told you that, did she?” she said, staring me suddenly in the eyes.