‘I find,’ he said, with a vivacity in strong contrast with his previous manner, ‘that I can’t come to-day, but I hope you’ll give me another chance. Supposing you and your friends are at liberty for this evening, will you bring them to dine with me? I can trust the Poule d’Or; I know it of old.’
‘Good,’ said Ralston. ‘If they are at liberty, we’ll be there. What time shall we say? Seven?’
‘Seven,’ Paul answered brightly.
But a new confusion fell upon him. Not a muscle of Ralston’s swarthy clear-cut face or the full-bearded lips moved, but there was a dancing little demon of not more than half-malicious humour in his eyes.
‘Seven,’ Paul repeated. ‘You’ll excuse me now? You won’t think my haste unfriendly?’
‘My dear fellow!’ cried Ralston, the fun rioting in his eyes by this time, though his features were as still as those of a graven image.
‘Well,’ said Paul, with a desperate, fruitless effort to recover himself, ‘until seven.’
Ralston shook hands and went his way, and Paul raced upstairs two steps at a time and burst into the room he had left less than three hours ago in a mood so cheerless and despondent He kissed the letter and clapped it to his heart, and strolled up and down exulting. He was not to be dismissed; he was not to be sent into the desert, after all.
And, then, what about Ralston? It was really a most unpleasant, a most unlucky, chance which had brought him there at that particular instant. There was no blinking the fact that Ralston had enjoyed Paul’s discomfiture, and his talk of the previous night came back to mind—the fun he had made of the Isolated Soul; his good-humoured allowance for the one foible in the character of a lady whom he had known from childhood, and for whom he professed both affection and esteem. It matters not how impossible a suggestion of this kind may seem to a lover’s mind. His rejection of it with a natural scorn is of no manner of consequence except inasmuch as it confirms his loyalty. The suggestion will stick and will worry, and it will stick the longer and worry the more because it will make the sufferer suspicious of himself. ‘Trust me not at all, or all in all,’ is a native motto for the man of candid soul, and for him an implanted mistrust will not touch his mistress, though it may anguish him with a sense of his own unworthiness.
But—for the time, at least—these things were no more than mere trickeries of self-torment for Paul’s mind, and he was on fire to meet the mid-day. He got out his handsomest morning raiment and brushed it with his own hands, and made a second toilet lest there should be a speck on cuff or collar after the morning’s drive, and then he promenaded the streets at a snail’s pace to kill the hour which intervened between himself and heaven.