And the chances of tracing him were now far different from those when I had fruitlessly sought him in London, only to have him put his hand on my shoulder in a Shaftesbury Avenue picture-house in the end. For he had been a middle-aged man then, with all the bolt-holes of his successive personal appearances to dodge fantastically in and out of. Then, a night, any night, might have made him unrecognisable, nameless, a ghost among living men. But between eighteen and sixteen is no very great difference. He might be a little less tall, a little less broad, but somewhere between those two years he was cornered. His description was circulated, hers did not vary. They had been gone four days. Probably a week at the outside would see him touched on the shoulder in this place or that, a "Pardon, M'sieu'" spoken in his ear, and back to Alec he would go.
And though I have said as a foolish figure of speech that on that magical Island of theirs they were unapproachably alone, that was the important thing from Alec's point of view.
There is a little café tucked away in an angle of the Rue de l'Apport, called, if I remember rightly, the Café des Porches. If it is not called that it ought to be, for these Porches stride out over the pavement on their ancient legs of stone and wood as if to knock together the overhanging brows of their fantastic upper stories. Indeed one would say that the stalls and shops and barrows tunnelled beneath them had but a moment before been flush with those ancient façades, and that at a call the whole house had suddenly advanced a pace, and the next moment might advance another. And if you take a chest of drawers, and draw the bottom drawer out a little, and the one above a little more, and the one above that a little more still, and then set opposite to it another chest of drawers to which you have done the same, you will have the appearance of those carved and corbelled and enriched and decaying frontages. I passed under their trampling legs and sought my café.
I don't remember ever actually entering that café in my life. I preferred either of the two tiny round pavement-tables that stood one on either side of its low doorway. There was just room to squeeze in between the two portable hedges of privet that stood in long wooden boxes on the kerb; and from this seat, unless they happened to be coming towards you under the Porches or going directly away, little more than a glimpse of passers-by could be had through the narrow opening. If they happened to pass on a bicycle it was the merest zoetrope-flicker and they were gone.
I sat down, called for coffee and a fine, and watched the shopkeepers opposite putting up their shutters for the night.
One thing at any rate seemed now to be over and done with, and that was poor Julia Oliphant's desperate adventure. Poor woman, it was as much for her sake as theirs that I had left the Airds for a few days. Could she have done the same and have gone back to England it might have been as well, but that would have been to leave Madge insupportably alone. A single day in that daughterless house had been enough for me. The next morning I had made my explanation, had promised to return, had made a few purchases, and had packed my bag. Any news was to be wired or telephoned to me at the Poste. That briefly-concluded arrangement had been practically the whole of my conversation with Madge.
With Julia I had had even fewer words; for what was there to say? Even to Madge one could hardly have committed the grossness and superfluity of saying that one was sorry; what then of Julia? Was I sorry? For herself my heart bled; but was I sorry for the miscarriage of her vehement and tremendous attempt?
Yet how remember her as I had found her in the salon on the morning of the discovery, and be glad for Derwent Rose and his irregular bridal? She had worn a hat and frock of white piqué, but the piqué had not been whiter than her face nor the auracaria darker than her sombre lashes and ringed eyes.
"You've heard?" she had said.
"Alec's just told me."