"She intrigues you, then—Maxine?"
"Marvellously—as the Sphinx intrigues me! To begin with, why the name? You Max! She Maxine!"
For an instant Max scanned the dark plantation with knitted brows; then he looked over his shoulder with a peculiar smile.
"We are twins, mon cher!" he said, taking secret joy in the elaboration of his lie. "My mother was a Frenchwoman, by name Maxine, and when she died at our birth, my father in his grief bestowed the name upon us both—the boy and the girl—Max and Maxine!" Very carefully he lighted his cigarette. His whole nature was quivering to the dangers of this masked confession—this dancing upon the edge of the precipice. "My father was a man of ideas!" He carefully threw the match down into the rue Müller.
"Your father, I take it, was a personage of importance?" Blake was momentarily sarcastic.
"A personage, yes," the boy admitted, "but that is not the point. The point is that he was a man of ideas, who understood the body and the soul. A man who trained a child in every outdoor sport until it was one with nature, and then taught it to entrap nature and bend her to the uses of art. He was very great—my father!"
"He is dead?"
"Yes; he is dead. He died the year before Maxine married."
"Ah, she married?" Absurd as it might seem, there was a fleeting shadow of disappointment discernible in Blake's voice.
"Yes, she married. After my father's death she went to my aunt in Petersburg, and there she forgot both nature and art—and me."