“Who is she?”
“She’s been here twice to tea. An American lady, rather well-dressed. Heloise! That’s her name. And a good-looker. She usually wears black and paradise feathers.”
“She wore paradise feathers!” said cook and Eleanor together.
Trenter nodded.
“That’s her,” he said, “but there’s nothing in it. She’s a highbrow. Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn’t make head or tail of.”
Eleanor was impressed.
“Funny for him to be discussing eggs,” she said.
It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of speech.
Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel, and they were comparatively alone.
“There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you, Heloise,” he said softly. “A month! It almost seems incredible! If our theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation ...?”