‘Give me your hands, then. You won’t try to keep me?’
‘No, no, no.’
She kissed him warmly and lingeringly on the lips, and darted suddenly away. Paul rose to his feet and held out his arms towards her.
‘Your promise,’ she said. ‘Your word of honour as a gentleman.’ He dropped his hands. ‘You shall be paid for that,’ she whispered, with a face glowing like his own, and she returned to him and kissed him once more, holding his hands in hers. Then she left him swiftly and ran down the pathway, turning at the bend to waft a last kiss to him, and so was gone.
Paul mooned about in a miserable, aching ecstasy for a quarter of an hour or so, and then, finding by his watch that the supper-hour appointed by Darco was near at hand, he sauntered to the hotel. Miss Belmont was there before him, radiant and serene, and looking as unkissable as Diana. Paul would have approached her, but a mere motion of her fine eyebrows warned him off. He ate little, but he drank a good deal of wine, and was gay and moody by turns as he was driven home. And far into the night in his own room he walked up and down and made verses and raved them in whispers to himself, because Darco slept in the next apartment, and was not at all the man to be wisely awakened by the voice of Love’s young dream. He drew his curtains apart and opened his window on the scented night, and took the moon and stars into his confidence, and the kisses bit softly down into his heart like fire.
Other scenes there were in which the cunning damsel betrayed Paul into the belief that he was an ennobling and lofty influence in her life. She was rigid in her choice of topics for conversation, but she ornamented her speech now and then with an almost masculine embroidery, and once she caught Paul looking at her with a shocked and wounded air.
‘I caught your look,’ she said, as soon as she could speak to him alone. ‘I know what it meant, and, oh! you made me hate myself. There isn’t any real harm in it—I mean, it isn’t wicked—but it isn’t refined or womanly, and I’ll ‘never do it again—never, never, never, for my dear little Paul’s sake. And Paul shall have a kiss for teaching Claudia a lesson. Naughty Claudia!’
And again one day at rehearsal Miss Belmont ordered a brandy-and-soda, and Paul’s face clouded; and Claudia was penitent, and Paul got more kisses for helping naughty Claudia to forget these man-like habits.
The boy’s infatuation chimed in with a growing liking for the stage, and he volunteered to work there with so much ardour that Darco was newly pleased with him, and gave him ample opportunity. So he saw more and more of Claudia, and made some progress in his new craft, and the foolish game of love went on, until it brought about a crisis.
It was three o’clock on Friday afternoon, and Paul was at the theatre, seated in the manager’s room, counting and putting into envelopes the weekly salaries of the company. He had just consigned the two crispest and cleanest of his small stock of five-pound notes and the brightest half-sovereign to an envelope bearing the name of Miss Claudia Belmont, when the lady herself tapped at the door and entered.