“Yes,” he replied, quite sincerely, “it is all right. You see I know Paris very well.”
She did not look convinced, but Sengoun came up and she bade them both good night and went away with the Princess Mistchenka.
As, arm in arm, the two young men sauntered around the corner of the rue Soleil d’Or, two men who had been sitting on a marble bench beside the sun-dial fountain rose and strolled after them.
CHAPTER XXX
JARDIN RUSSE
At midnight the two young men had not yet parted. For, as Sengoun explained, the hour for parting was already past, and it was too late to consider it now. And Neeland thought so, too, what with the laughter and the music, and the soft night breezes to counsel folly, and the city’s haunting brilliancy stretching away in bewitching perspectives still unexplored.
From every fairy lamp the lustrous capital signalled to youth her invitation, her challenge, and her menace. Like some jewelled sorceress—some dreaming Circe by the river bank, pondering new spells—so Paris lay in all her mystery and beauty under the July stars.
Sengoun, his arm through Neeland’s, had become affectionately confidential. He explained that he really was a nocturnal creature; that now he had completely waked up; that his habits were due to a passion for astronomy, and that the stars he had discovered at odd hours of the early morning were more amazing than any celestial bodies ever before identified.