"Aren't you going up?" he repeated.
"We'll look into the reading-room later on," replied Ainsworth. "I don't care to dance, and it disagrees with Trascott's digestion."
"See you there, then," was his farewell. "Don't forget you can get all you want to eat in the dining-room for the sum of six francs."
A fiacre pulled up near the wharf at his hail.
"Hotel de ––," he said, jumping in with an object-lesson of alacrity.
The driver accepted the hint and dashed away at a swift pace through the lower town till the long ascent which led up to Mustapha Supérieure compelled him to walk his animal.
The last two weeks had passed for Rex Britton as a single day. Not a minute of the whole time dragged, for the reason that he had spent every available minute with Maud Morris. He considered the sojourn, which he had lengthened day by day, as Paradise–the direct antithesis, in fact, of Ainsworth's view! He had pursued the wild dream of that first night on the harbor with all his passionate persistence till it suddenly ensnared him in its tangible and compelling reality.
The lawyer back on the pier was wishing for something to hasten the climax. In spite of his faculty of shrewd observation, Ainsworth did not dream of how deeply Britton was already involved with the woman whom he, Ainsworth, mistrusted.
It would take a wise man indeed to time and trace the development of a romance when the setting lies between the pagan Djujuras and the legend-steeped Mediterranean. Britton would have been filled with dismay had he stopped to inspect, analyze and adjudge his actions during those two weeks. His impulses were at riot under the sway of a heavenly elixir which the woman held to his lips; he never looked back; his mind was centred on the days ahead, planning a wonderful permanency for the exotic, filmy atmosphere of present experiences.
As the fiacre climbed the Mustapha Supérieure Britton could possess in vision the whole expanse of the port, the wharves dimly lighted and busy with the night-labor that the volume of trade enforced, the illuminated vessels in the wide anchorage and the mingling gleams that marked the Mustapha Inférieure.