"Oh—Lucy Money; yes. She was at school with us, and we used to be fond of each other. I think of calling to see her, but she may be changed ever so much, and perhaps we shan't get on together at all. Her father has become a sort of great man in London, I believe—I don't know how. They won't trouble us much, I dare say."
The friends then sat and talked for a short time about their project. It is curious to observe that though they were such devoted friends they looked on their joint purpose with very different eyes. The young woman, with her beauty, her spirit, and her talents, was absolutely sincere and single-minded, and was going to London with the sole purpose of living a free, secluded life, without ambition, without thought of any manner of success. The poor little old maid had her head already filled with wild dreams of fame to be found in London, of a distinguished brother, a bright career, publishers seeking for everything she wrote, and her name often in the papers. Devoted as she was to Miss Grey, or perhaps because she was so devoted to her, she had already been forming vague but delightful hopes about the reformed brother which she would not now for all the world have ventured to hint to her friend.
CHAPTER III.
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE.
Late that same night a young man stepped from a window in one of the rooms on the third floor in the Hôtel du Louvre in Paris, and stood in the balcony. It was a balcony in that side of the hotel which looks on the Rue de Rivoli. The young man smoked a cigar and leaned over the balcony.
It was a soft moonlight night. The hour was late and the streets were nearly silent. The latest omnibus had gone its way, and only now and then a rare and lingering voiture clicked and clattered along, to disappear round the corner of the place in front of the Palais Royal. The long line of gas lamps, looking a faint yellow beneath the hotel and the Louvre Palace across the way, seemed to deepen and deepen into redder sparks the further the eye followed them to the right as they stretched on to the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées. To the left the young man, leaning from the balcony, could see the tower of St. Jacques standing darkly out against the faint, pale blue of the moonlighted sky. The street was a line of silver or snow in the moonlight.
The young man was tall, thin, dark, and handsome. He was unmistakably English, although he had an excitable and nervous way about him which did not savor of British coolness and composure. He seemed a person not to take anything easily. Even the moonlight, and the solitude, and the indescribably soothing and philosophic influence of the contemplation of a silent city from the serene heights of a balcony, did not prevail to take him out of himself into the upper ether of mental repose. He pulled his long moustaches now and then, until they met like a kind of strap beneath his chin, and again he twisted their ends up as if he desired to appear fierce as a champion duellist of the Bonapartist group. He sometimes took his cigar from his lips and held it between his fingers until it went out, and when he put it into his mouth again he took several long puffs before he quite realized the fact that he was puffing at what one might term dry stubble. Then he pulled out a box of fusees and lighted his cigar in an irritated way, as if he were protesting that really the fates were bearing down upon him rather too heavily, and that he was entitled to complain at last.
"Good evening, sir," said a strong, full British voice that sounded just at his elbow.
The young man, looking round, saw that his next-door neighbor in the hotel had likewise opened his window and stepped out on his balcony. The two had met before, or at least seen each other before, once or twice. The young man had seen the elder with some ladies at breakfast in the hotel, and that evening he and his neighbor had taken coffee side by side on the boulevards and smoked and exchanged a few words.
The elder man's strong, rather under-sized figure showed very clearly in the moonlight. He had thick, almost shaggy hair, of an indefinable dark brownish color—hair that was not curly, that was not straight, that did not stand up, and yet could evidently never be kept down. He had a rough complexioned face, with heavy eyebrows and stubby British whiskers. His hands were large and reddish-brown and coarse. He was dressed carelessly—that is, his clothes were evidently garments that had cost money, but he did not seem to care how he wore them. Any garment must fall readily into shapelessness and give up trying to fit well on that unheeding figure. The Briton did not seem exactly what one would at once assume to be a gentleman. Yet he was not vulgar, and he was evidently quite at his ease with himself. He looked somehow like a man who had money or power of some kind, and who did not care whether people knew it or did not know it. Our younger Briton had at the first glance taken him for the ordinary English father of a family, travelling with his womankind. But he had not seen him for two minutes at the breakfast table before he observed that the supposed heavy father was never in a fuss, had a way of having all his orders obeyed without trouble or misunderstanding, and for all his strong British accent talked French with entire ease and a sort of resolute grammatical accuracy.