“My G—dn—ss! 1722! Printed at Venice, I s’pose: Palestrine fount and borders by Manucci.… I know the sort. Bless your innocent heart! that’s no b——y good! Common as dirt, these are. If that’s all you know about the Arbiter, you’re no good to me. So ta-ta, caro incognito!”
She turned angrily on her heel.
“But here!” he caught her by the sleeve. “Take this, I beg as a favour—a token to remember our little meeting.”
Gaveston slipped from his finger the exquisite cameo of Cypriote turquoise that the old Duchesa da Chianti had bequeathed him, and quickly but tactfully wrapping it in a ten-pound note, he pressed it into her little quivering palm.[13]
[13] See note, [page 74]. (Lit. Exec.)
She disappeared.
Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient, smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from the ffoulises.
But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement.