“Why, Count,” I said, astonished, “don’t be foolish. I’m in a hurry to-night, that’s all. I’ve an engagement.”
“Very vell, Miss Ascough? Hurry you out. It is pest you come not pack again.”
“Oh, very well!” I said. “Good-bye.” I ran down the stairs, feeling much provoked with the foolish old fellow.
Poor old Count! How I wish I had been kinder and more grateful to him; but in my egotistical youth I was incapable of hearing or understanding his pathetic call for sympathy and companionship. I was flying along through life, as we do in youth. I was, indeed, as I had said, “in a hurry.”
He died a few years later in our Montreal, a stranger among strangers, who saw only in the really beauty-loving soul of the artist the grotesque and queer. I wished then that I could have been with him in the end, but I myself was in a strange land, and I was experiencing some of the same appalling loneliness that had so oppressed and crushed my old friend.
XIX
WHEN I told Reggie I was not going to the Château any more, he was very thoughtful for some time. Then he said:
“Why don’t you take a studio up town? You can’t do anything in this God-forsaken Hochelaga.”
“Why, Reggie,” I said, “you talk as if a studio were to be had for nothing. Where can I find the money to pay the rent?”
“Look here,” said he, “I’m sure to pass my finals this spring, and I’m awfully busy. It takes a deuce of a time to get down here. Now if you had a studio of your own it would be perfectly proper for me to see you there, and then, besides, don’t you see, darling, I would have you all to myself? Here we are never alone hardly, unless I take you out.”