The exodus from the Latin Quarter begun, the “boys” burst in upon Noll and Betty—Babette and Horace and the Disturber of Funerals and the rest, and Gaston Latour. They all helped to pack, and dragged them off to join the mighty holiday stream, going down to the outskirts of Paris, to Enghien-les-Bains and Montmorency, by train, Gaston Latour rending the air with devilish din of French horn, and insisting on dancing the Arab danse-de-ventre before railway officials and the police, his melancholy face seriously unsmiling as he stepped it, the others wailing the mournful Moorish music and beating time with tap of canes or beat of hands.... And all too fleetly the summer days went by in the pretty country places round about Paris.
Betty loved this summer time. Noll was with her all the day long, blithe of heart and in good spirits, sketching with her and a dozen others out of doors or writing by her side in their delightfully bare room in the primitive inn. The world was fragrant with the scent of flowers.
As the sunny daytime passed into the violet grey dusk, they would wander arm in arm along the pretty country roads—Babette and Horace, Noll and Betty, Gaston and the beautiful Liane, the Five Foolish Virgins and the rest—straying through the twilight carelessly, never wandering too far from civilization and the band and the casino’s paper lanterns—never too far to reach the merry dinner of an evening, lolling in pleasant fatigue round the table in the trim little bosquets of the courtyards of inns, where they all loitered over dinner to talk wondrous nonsense about the delights of a country life, mixed with criticisms of art and of books and of the world. And, the dinner done, they would stroll round the lake, and sit upon the banks, and gaze entranced at the moonlit fairyland—the lights that danced upon the waters and the stars that bespangled the sapphire heavens with a myriad winking mysteries—glad to be alive where all was beautiful.
And there would be sweet idle talk of the day when they should all have villas on the lake with lawns by the water’s edge, disdainful of the rough struggle of the world, watching the pigeons and the peacocks in the sun, listening to the coo of doves, and, when the day was done, content to sit at gaze with the wizard moon and myriad stars, fretting their souls with no stupid thought for fame or name—yet each one knowing in his heart that in most delicious idleness would be weariness beyond the weariness of toil.
There was one thorn only in all this summer delight—Moll Davenant, moody, a prey to odd whims, possessed now of strange reservations and sudden shrinkings, now frightened, now daring, now boisterous, now brooding, lived feverishly, crowding her life into its little span, her pathetic eyes on her doom, as one who knows how short a while she has to live. More than once, Betty had sold some trinket of her own to get the wherewithal to tempt the uncertain appetite; and Noll, too, was the poorer by more than one little possession which he cheerily said he did not want. Then the girl would disappear for days, returning fagged and troubled, like one drugged. Her flushed colour showed that the flames of her life were burning out the tissues of her frail body, and a feverish desire to live the night as well as the day urged her to frantic bursts of work and of excitement, alternating with long hours of lassitude and a pathetic patience and humility and listless idleness. One day she disappeared and was not heard of for a week; then the news came from far away that she had been seen at the casino at Dieppe with Aubrey.
******
At the doors of the Hotel Continental in Paris stood Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott, talking to Quogge Myre; Rupert Greppel and Lord Monty Askew stood at either hand; they gazed superciliously at the passers-by.
Ponsonby Ffolliott, blowing cigarette smoke through his nostrils, said, drawling:
“It’s an awful bore—but Lady Boone is throwing her girl at my head—an awfully pretty girl, she is, by Jove—but, you know, a fellow must have his fling first—or how is a fellow to know he loves the girl—and I am really quite too young——”
They slapped him on the back, and there was laughter.