Yes, there was excuse; and yet it was the height of folly. Girls mean expenditure in one way or another, and just now neither he nor O’Hara had anything to spend. While he was thinking, however, O’Hara was acting.
He offered the girl a cigarette, she smilingly rejected it; but the ice was broken, and the conversation begun. There is no need to go into any particulars as to what followed—it was what always did follow in a case of this description—blind infatuation that invariably ended with a startling abruptness; only in this instance the infatuation was blinder than ever, and the ending, though sudden, was not usual. O’Hara asked the girl to dinner with him that night. She accepted, and he took her out again the following evening. From that moment all reason left him, and he gave himself up to the maddest of mad passions.
Menzies saw little of him, but when they did by chance happen to meet it was always the same old tale—Gabrielle! Gabrielle Delacourt. Her star-like eyes, gorgeous hair, and so forth.
Then came a night when Menzies, tired of his own company, wandered off to Montmartre, and met a fellow-countryman of his, by name Douglas.
“I say, old fellow,” the latter remarked, as they lolled over a little marble-topped table and watched the evolutions of a more than usually daring vaudeville artiste, “I say, how about that Irish pal of yours, ‘O’ something or other. I saw him here the other night with Marie Diblanc.”
“Marie Diblanc!” Menzies articulated. “I have never heard of her.”
“Not heard of Marie Diblanc!” Douglas exclaimed. “Why I thought every journalist in Paris knew of her, but perhaps she was before your time, for she’s had a pretty long spell of prison—at least five or six years, which as you know is pretty stiff nowadays for a woman—and has only recently come out. She was quite a kiddie when they bagged her, but a kiddie with a mind as old as Brinvillier’s in crime and vice—she robbed and all but murdered her own mother for a few louis, besides forging cheques and stealing wholesale from shops and hotels. They say she was in with all the worst crooks in Europe, and surpassed them all in subtlety and daring. When I saw her the other night her hair was dyed, and she was wearing the most saint-like expression; but I knew her all the same. She couldn’t disguise her mouth or her hands, and it is those features that I notice in a woman more than anything else.”
“Describe her to me,” Menzies said.
“A brunette originally,” Douglas replied, “but now a blonde—masses of very elaborately waved golden hair; peculiarly long eyes—rather too intensely blue and far apart for my liking—a well-moulded mouth, though the lips are far too thin, and give her away at once.”
“That’s the girl,” Menzies exclaimed emphatically. “That’s the girl he calls Gabrielle Delacourt. I was with him the day he first met her—over in Montparnasse.”