"I have averted two," agreed the Prince. "You are right; that in itself is almost a sign. It it gives me hope for the third the blind man."
"Eh? The blind man? What blind man?"
The Prince took a spoonful of soup.
"Sometimes I forget how young you are," he said. "A blind man, of course, is nothing to you. You give him an alms, touching his hand when you put the money into it, and go on to the club to play bridge. But if I, by any chance of the street, were to touch a blind man, I should go home and go to bed. I have my share of prudence me! and that is a risk I do not take. No!"
He interrupted himself to drink from his glass, while Dupontel sat back and prepared, with a gesture of utter impatience, to be contemptuous and argumentative.
"Carigny," said the Prince, setting his glass down, "Carigny, in the old days, believed that too. But he was not prudent. That night we played, that last night of which he writes in his letter, there was a blind man who begged of him. And when he would have dropped a franc in his hand, the creature groped suddenly for the coin. We were walking to the club together, and I saw it, standing aside meanwhile. It was an old debris of a man, who begged in a voice that whispered and croaked, and his hand was shriveled and purple, and it wavered and trembled as he held it out. Because he was blind, with eyelids swollen and discolored, Carigny said, as he drew the money from his pocket: 'Here is a franc, my friend!' Then the old creature groped, as I have said, with a jerk of his inhuman claw, and grabbed the money from Carigny before he could let it fall, and I saw their hands touch. Carigny would not have played that night but that we had appointed to play."
"You could have let him off till next day," said Dupontel.
The Prince shook his head. "In those times," he said, "it was not the custom to break one's engagements neither to break them nor to allow them to be broken."
"I should like to see this Carigny of yours," said Dupontel thoughtfully. "When do you expect him to call on you?"
"His letter says 'as soon as possible,'" answered the Prince. "That constitutes in itself an engagement which Carigny will not fail to keep. He will come this afternoon."