To the reader who has followed the fortunes of Count Litvinoff so far we need hardly mention the fact that as soon as he was clear of Marlborough Villa he pulled out his cigar-case. It had always been a favourite theory of his that a cigar and not a mill-pond was the appropriate sequel to an unsuccessful love affair. Not that it had ever occurred to him as even remotely possible that such an experience could ever be his. Here it was, however, and he had one of those opportunities which always charm the thinker—that of being able to apply to his own case a theory invented for other people. He took a meditative turn round Regent's Park. It is a strange fact which we do not remember to have seen commented on by any other writer—that when a man comes away from an interview with a girl to whom he has been making love he is inevitably driven to think, not of her alone, but also of one, two, three or more of the other girls to whom he has from time to time made love in the remote or recent past. Such is the depravity of the 'natural man' that these thoughts are not generally sad ones. But Litvinoff's thoughts were genuinely sad. He had said to Miss Stanley that he was a traitor and a villain, and it had not been said for dramatic effect. He meant it. He would have given a good many years of any life that might lie before him to undo a few of the years that lay behind.
'I am not consistent enough for a villain,' he said to himself. 'I have failed in that part, and now I will go in for my natural rôle of a fool, and I've a sort of idea that I shall get on better. And the first thing to be done is to find my little one. Fool as I am, I've generally been able to do anything I've really set my mind on. The reason I've failed in my "deep-laid schemes" has been that I didn't always care whether I won or not. I can be in the same mind about this matter, however, for a long enough time to achieve what I want. As for principles, they bore me. If it hadn't been for my principles I shouldn't have got into half this trouble. What shall I do with myself till my mysterious friend turns up?'
After a minute's hesitation he turned into the Zoological Gardens, where he spent some thought on the wasting of an hour or so among the beasts, incurred the undying hatred of an alligator by stirring him up with the ferule of his stick, irritated the llama to the point of expectoration, and grossly insulted the oldest inhabitant of the monkey-house.
His luncheon was a bath bun and a glass of milk.
'A fourpenny luncheon,' he said to himself, 'is the first step in the path of virtue.'
At half-past three he got back to his lodgings, and sat down with the resolution of going thoroughly into his financial affairs. To that he thought he would devote an hour or two, and in the evening he would try to find the lost clue in Spray's Buildings. This looking into his finances struck him as being a business-like sort of thing to do, and quite in harmony with his present frame of mind.
He was soon busy at his light writing-table. Presently he drew from a drawer his banker's pass-book, made bulky with cancelled cheques. He groaned earnestly.
'Alas!' he said to himself, 'how sadly simple and easy it is to sign one's name on this nice smooth coloured paper. I suppose it's best to check these off—bankers' clerks are so dreadfully careless.'