Linnet debated internally. Florian paused, and looked judicial. “What sort of person is she?” Linnet asked at last, hesitating. “Kind—nice—sympathetic?”
“You’ve summed her up in one word!” Florian answered with a flourish. “Sympathetic—that’s just it; she’s bubbling over with sympathy. She goes out to all troubled souls. Though I’m her own brother, and therefore naturally prejudiced against her, I never knew anyone so intensely capable of throwing herself forth towards other people as my sister Marian. She’s the exact antipodes of that unspeakable Sartoris woman; human, human, human, above all things human; she brims and overflows with the milk of human kindness! And she took such a fancy to you, too, when she saw you one night, in Cophetua’s Adventure. She said to me, ‘O Florian, do you think she’d come and stay with us? I’d give anything to know that sweet creature personally.’ I told her, of course, you never stayed with anybody under the rank of a crowned head or a millionaire soap-boiler. She was quite disappointed, and she’d be only too delighted now, I’m sure, if she could be of any service to you.”
He looked at her hard. He had provided a sister, mentally. As a matter of fact, he knew a lady—a most obliging lady—tolerably reputable, too—in a side street in Pimlico, who would be willing (for a slight consideration) to take Linnet in, and adopt any relation she was told to Florian. Once get a married woman (and a singer-body at that) away from her husband, into a house of your own choosing, and—given agreeable manners and a persuasive tongue—you can do before long pretty much what you like with her. So, at least, Florian’s philosophy had always instructed him. He chuckled to himself to think pure chance should have enabled him thus to anticipate Will Deverill. And if Will was playing this game, this simple little game, why on earth shouldn’t he play it too, and outwit his rival?
He went on to expatiate very enthusiastically to Linnet on the imaginary sister’s sympathetic virtues. In a few minutes he had made her so absolutely charming—for he was a fluent talker—that at last Linnet, who, like all Tyrolese, was impulsive at heart, jumped up from her seat and exclaimed with a sudden burst, “Very well, then; I’ll go there. It’s safer there than here. We can leave a line for Will to let him have the address. I’ll sit down and write it.”
“No, no,” Florian cried, eagerly, seizing a pen in haste. “I’ll write it myself. Then we’ll take a cab outside, and go round there together.”
For if once Linnet was seen with him in a hansom in the street—after leaving her husband—her fate was sealed. She might as well do what all the world would immediately say she was bent on doing.
CHAPTER XLV
BY AUTHORITY
As Florian sat there, scribbling off a few lines of apology for their hasty departure, the door opened of a sudden—and Will Deverill entered.