“You don’t mean to say, Carthew, that you are going to take on palmistry?”
“I had an hour to fill in before meeting my father,” Lord Carthew continued, quite unmoved by his companion’s raillery, “and as it was too cold to study the shops, and there were no picture-galleries worth seeing open, I dropped into Mlle. Kyro’s. You know what a success she made of it until the police, tired of running in old women for getting sixpences out of servant girls, shut up her entertainment. Well, she was a very charming woman, and didn’t go in for any ‘fee, faw, fum,’ at all. She studied my face and my hands, and after some very happy guessing at what had already happened to me, she proceeded to foretell that in the spring of this year I should meet unexpectedly, while on a journey, a lady with whom I should fall madly in love. Meeting her would, so she declared, alter the whole course of my life. Furthermore, I should marry, and go through a whole sea of trouble, and as far as she would tell me, even worse misfortunes were in store. Kyro, however, with tears in her eyes—very pretty eyes, by the way—begged me to be the arbiter of my own fate. All these troubles could be avoided, so she assured me, if I would be guided by reason and not by passion. I thanked her for her good advice; she gave me a cup of tea and I left the fee on the table, and there is the end of it—or perhaps, the beginning.”
“You are not going to tell me,” exclaimed Hilary, “that a man of your intellectual attainments attaches the slightest importance to such utter nonsense as professional fortune-telling? I shall begin to believe study has turned your brain.”
“Just as you like,” said Lord Carthew, shrugging his shoulders with sudden indifference. “But to return to our former subject, grant me this favor, Hilary. It will certainly be our last outing together for a long time, possibly forever. You are going to settle out there, you will marry——”
“Not exactly,” broke in Hilary, with hearty emphasis. “Marriage isn’t part of my programme, by any means. I’ve got to make my way and to make money, and I don’t want a burden around my neck to start with.”
“Anyhow, our ways will widen apart. It will do you no harm to lend me your name for a few days. I will solemnly vow not to bring it into discredit, and if the trick be found out, it will only be considered as another freak of ‘mad Carthew,’ as they call me at Oxford.”
“I don’t care to go masquerading about the country in borrowed plumes——”
“Still, you must, just for a day or two, until I have made you own I was in the right, about the snobbishness and all that. How can it affect you? We shall probably only meet innkeepers, chance visitors, waiters, and hostlers, and you are just leaving England and not in the least likely to see any of them again.”
He was so persistent in his arguments that Hilary at length agreed, for peace and quiet, to fall in with his views, at least tacitly.
“But you must do all the lying,” he stipulated. “I lie with the most confounded clumsiness. Besides, I don’t like it. I’ll humor your whim so far as to call you Claud only and not Carthew, and to answer to my own name. And on your head be all the complications which may arise from your silly freak.”