‘I suppose,’ muttered he, ‘I too might win success if I could stifle all sense of conscience within me, and be the slave of the vile thing they call the world. It is what men would call my own fault if I be poor and friendless—so, assuredly, Mirabeau would say.’
‘Mirabeau will not say so any more then,’ said a voice close beside him in the dark street.
‘Why so?’ asked Gerald fiercely.
‘Simply because that great moralist is dead.’
Not noticing the half sarcasm of the epithet, Gerald eagerly asked when the event occurred.
‘I can tell you almost to a minute,’ said the other. ‘We were just coming to the close of the third act of the piece “L’Amour le veut,” where I was playing Jostard, when the news came; and the public at once called out, “Drop the curtain.”’
As the speaker had just concluded these words, the light of a street lamp fell full upon his figure, and Gerald beheld a meanly clad but good-looking man of about eight-and-twenty, whose features were not unfamiliar to him.
‘We have met before, sir,’ said he.
‘It was because I recognised your voice I ventured to address you; you were a Garde du Corps once?’
‘And you?’