"What time is it?" I asked.
"After midnight. But you are not going to leave me like this, my dear boy? I am heavy-hearted."
He wept bitterly. The tail of his coat spread out on the divan behind him like the apple-green wings of a beetle.
"
Isn't Aguida a beauty?" he went on, still weeping. "She makes me think of the Countess de Teruel, though she is a little darker. You know the Countess de Teruel, Mercedes, who went in bathing nude at Biarritz, in front of the rock of the Virgin, one day when Prince Bismarck was standing on the foot-bridge. You do not remember her? Mercedes de Teruel."
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I forget; you must have been too young. Two, perhaps three years old. A child. Yes, a child. Oh, my child, to have been of that generation and to be reduced to playing cards with savages ... I must tell you...."
I stood up and pushed him off.
"Stay, stay," he implored. "I will tell you everything you want to know, how I came here, things I have never told anyone. Stay, I must unbosom myself to a true friend. I will tell you everything, I repeat. I trust you. You are a Frenchman, a gentleman. I know that you will repeat nothing to her."
"That I will repeat nothing to her?... To whom?"