Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways….
This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of Monsieur André Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.
One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she should dine with him that night.
Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the company of Cecelia Brooke?
No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.
She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded, honest—the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a thief.
If she even dreamed….
Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity, perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold, soulless, cruel.
One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.
At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.