"So your old friend Boriskoff has found you a job?" he said, laying a patronizing hand on the lad's stout shoulder. "Well, well, I knew Richard Gessner when I was—er—hem—on duty in Kensington, and in all matters of public charity I certainly found him to be an example. You know, of course, that he is a Pole and that his real name is Maxim Gogol. General Kaulbars told me as much when he was visiting England some years ago. Your friend is a Pole who would find himself singularly inconvenienced if he were called upon to return to Poland. Believe me, how very much astonished I was to hear that you had taken up your residence in his house."
"Then you heard about it—from whom?" Alban asked.
"Oh, 'Betty' followed you, on the day the person who calls himself Willy Forrest, but is really the son of a jockey named Weston, returned from Winchester. We were anxious about you, Alban—we questioned the company into which you had fallen. I may say, indeed, that our hearths were desolate and crape adorned our spears. We thought that you had forgotten us—and what is life when those who should remember prefer to forget."
Alban answered at hazard, for he knew perfectly well what was coming. The boy "Betty," still frightened out of his wits, clung close to the skirts of the homeless Sarah and walked with her, he knew not whither. A drizzle of rain had begun to fall; the streets were shining as desolate rivers of the night—the Caves behind them stood for a house of the enemy which none might enter again. But Alban alone was silent—for his generosity had loosened the pilgrims' tongues, and they spoke as they went of a morrow which should give them bread.
CHAPTER XV
A STUDY IN INDIFFERENCE
There are many spurs to a woman's vanity, but declared indifference is surely the sharpest of them all. When Anna Gessner discovered that Alban was not willing to enroll himself in the great band of worshippers who knelt humbly at her golden shrine, she set about converting him with a haste which would have been dangerous but for its transparent dishonesty. In love herself, so far as such a woman could ever be in love at all, with the dashing and brainless jockey who managed her race-horses, she was quite accustomed, none the less, to add the passionate confessions and gold-sick protestations of others to her volume of amatory recollections, and it was not a little amazing that a mere youth should be discovered, so obstinate, so chilly and so indifferent as to remain insensible both to her charms and their value, in what her father had called "pounds sterling."