“Paris!” (She stopped breathing.)—“O that,” she said, looking at him again, “is simply heaven!”
“How do you know that, Miss Shepherd?”
“Oh, I have read it! I have read all Alphonse Daudet’s novels, and a lot of Balzac’s.”
As Gildea strolled through the warm night streets, smoking a cigar, he thought of her again for a moment, and laughed to himself.
“The one Parisienne I have met out of Paris,” he said to himself, “She is of the tribe of the fine steel-pearl mangeuses who rend life with their dear little white teeth for the pleasure of rending. She should have been born in a concierge’s lodge, with a future in ermine—and the Morgue. And yet she is better than the mere mangeuse: she has intelligence. She has to thank Australia for that. For a month, or even two, she would be supportable—but the “Petrel” would take three to get her to Naples, perhaps, and it would be more trouble to loose her and let her go then than now.”
He had been strolling about the streets for more than an hour. He was not quite sure where he was. He stopped for a moment to look about him. A short well-moulded figure in a close dress and a poke bonnet passed him and turned down a narrow street ten or twelve yards ahead. He threw away his cigar.
“Janet,” he said to himself, “sweet child! And she recognized me and went on.”
Janet, a Salvation Army “lass,” going down into the Little Bourke Street slums had indeed recognised him. The figure of a man, in a light overcoat open in front showing that he was in evening dress, was remarkable enough, to have attracted anyone’s attention there. She had looked up for a moment: caught a glimpse of his face and, with a wild throbbing heart and quivering lips, hurried by, and on, and away. Gildea’s investigations into the social condition of the place had made him many unexpected friends. Here was one who was something more than a friend, a lover, and he knew it.
“I am sick of it,” he said to himself, almost bitterly, “I will go away. I want change.”
At about five o’clock that morning Sir Horace Gildea was rowed aboard of the “Petrel,” which passed out of the Heads a little after one, and turned to the east, making for Sydney.