“But you noticed her confusion?”
“It was very apparent.”
“I pretended to believe it was Miss Cereal, and addressed her by that name.”
“Jove! and she——”
“Denied it with a trembling voice and great earnestness. I have known all along she was a foreigner from the quaint way she had of expressing herself in English. Upon my word I am more and more inclined to believe your remarkable theory to be true.”
So they saunter along, keeping a safe distance behind, yet close enough to see all that occurs. The two in front talk together in low tones such as would befit lovers. More than once Aleck finds a bitter feeling taking root in his heart, and it is only through severe measures that he is able to crush it. A new experience is being forced upon him, and when he realizes how his work of the early night must go for naught if there is another Richmond in the field, he smiles in the grim way some men have when inflicting torture upon themselves. He could not look more rigid and contemptuous were he holding a red-hot iron to his flesh and searing the fang-marks left by a mad dog.
As for Wycherley, that merry rascal appreciates the situation—and though incapable of experiencing the same sensations that creep over Aleck, he knows what it means. In his accustomed way he jokes about it.
“Feel like you’re marching to your own funeral, eh, Craig? Never mind, you can still be a brother to her. Great institution that. To my personal knowledge I occupy that delightful place of uncertainty to a dozen dainty despots here and abroad. I am connected, as it were, by ties of consanguinity to nearly every city of first importance in the world. Oh, take a veteran’s advice, my dear boy, and let no such little trouble disconcert you. A merry life—to enjoy pleasure as she flies—that’s my motto, and sad will be the day when I part from it.”
There are grains of sound philosophy in much that this strange genius says, if one can only separate the wheat from the chaff. Craig hears as in a dream, for his mind is upon those ahead. Shall he continue this espionage? Is it right? Where is the middle-aged duenna who was with Dorothy earlier in the evening? He knows she is secretly in the pay of the plotting pasha, but the young girl must as yet be ignorant of this fact. Perhaps she has left the other at a certain place, where she may be found later.
It is growing late.