'Are we to have no music, Miss Stanley?' he asked, when the subject of the financial condition of the United States railways was exhausted for the time being, and his host showed decided symptoms of a desire to descant on the beauties of 'our great Conservative institutions, sir,' and 'the glorious Constitution which,' etc.
Miss Stanley felt that singing to three people would be better than talking to one, and in the intervals between the songs that followed she and Litvinoff seemed to conspire to keep the conversation general.
'Penny Napoleon,' so often a refuge of the bored and the uncongenial, helped the long evening to its end, and though the last state of it was better than the first, everyone was glad to say good-night to everyone else.
The two young men, by the way, did not say good-night to each other when they left the Stanleys.
'Come and have a cigar,' said Litvinoff, precisely as he had done on the last occasion of their meeting there. And Roland, nothing loth to defer the moment of being alone again with his own perplexities, consented.
But even in the Count's comfortable little sitting-room his perplexities pursued him, and in more objectionable shape, too. For the first words his companion uttered, after he had supplied his guest with one of his special cigars and a tumbler of something unexceptionable, with lemon, hot, were—
'Your brother tells me you're taking an interest in my movements, Mr Ferrier.'
'How do you mean?'
'I had the felicity to meet him to-day, and he asked me—rather bluntly, perhaps—if I had been this afternoon in some street, the name of which escapes me at the moment—Morford Street, was it? I told him no, and begged to know the reason of his question. He then said he wished to verify (I think those were his exact words) a statement of yours. I asked him, did you take an interest in my movements? He then said, in a manner tant soit peu abrupt, 'You'd better ask him,' and vanished into the Ewigkeit. Voilà, I have asked you.'