Punctual to the moment, Timothy Varley stood in Chapel Place waiting for his unknown guide. Just as he was beginning to imagine the affair to be a hoax, and congratulating himself thereon, a woman passed him, stopped, and walked in his direction again. ‘God save Ireland!’ she said as she repassed.
‘Amen, not forgetting one Timothy Varley,’ he returned piously.
‘It is well,’ the woman replied calmly, ‘that you are here. Follow me!’
‘With the greatest of pleasure.—But hark here; my legs are not so young as yours: if we are going far, let us have a cab, and I’ll stand the damage.’
‘There is no occasion,’ the stranger said in a singularly sweet voice. ‘We have not a great distance to travel.’
‘Not good enough to ride in the same carriage with a gentleman’s gentleman,’ Varley muttered, for he did not fail to note the stranger’s refined tones.
His guide led him along Tottenham Court Road, and thence to Fitzroy Square. Turning into a little side-street, she reached at length a door, at which she knocked.
In a room on the first floor, Isodore and Valerie le Gautier were seated, waiting the advent of Lucrece and the stranger. Varley began to feel bewildered in the presence of so much beauty and grace; for Isodore’s loveliness overpowered him, as it did all men with whom she came in contact. Scarcely deigning to notice his presence, she motioned him to a chair, where he sat the picture of discomfiture, all traces of the audacious Irishman having disappeared.
‘Your name is Timothy Varley?’ Isodore said.
‘Yes, miss; leastways, it was when I came here, though, if you were to tell me I was the man in the moon, I couldn’t say nay to you.’