“Naudheim is impossible,” Saton answered. “He came in here to work this morning, looked around the room, and began to storm. He objected to the flowers, to the writing-table, to me. He has shaken the dust of us off his feet, and gone back to his wretched cabin in Switzerland.”
She leaned on her sticks and looked at him.
“On the face of the earth,” she said, “there does not breathe a fool like you.”
Saton’s expression hardened.
“You, too!” he exclaimed. “Well, go on.”
“Can’t you understand,” the woman exclaimed, her voice shaking, “that we are on the verge of a precipice? Do you read the papers? There were questions asked last night in the House about what they called these fortune-telling establishments. Yet everything goes on without a change—by your orders, I am told. Oh, you fool! Huntley knows that he is being spied upon. In Bond Street, yesterday alone, three detectives called at different times. The thing can’t go on. The money that we should save ready to escape at the end, you spend, living like this. And the girl Lois—you are letting her slip out of your fingers.”
“My dear Rachael,” he answered, “in the first place, there is not a thread of evidence to connect you or me with any one of these places, or with Huntley’s office. In the second place, I am not letting Lois slip out of my fingers. She will be of age in three weeks’ time, and on her birthday I am going to take her away from Rochester, whatever means I have to use, and I am going to marry her at once. You think that I am reckless. Well, one must live. Remember that I am young and you are old. I have no place in the world except the place I make for myself. I cannot live in a pig-sty amongst the snows like Naudheim. I cannot find the whole elixir of life in thoughts and solitude as he does. There are other things—other things for men of my age.”
“You sail too near the wind. You are reckless.”
“Perhaps I am,” he answered. “Life in ten years’ time may very well become a stranger place to those who are alive and who have been taught the truth. But life, even as we know it to-day, is strange enough. Rachael, have you ever loved anyone?”
The woman seemed to become nerveless. She sank into a chair.