"I don't want to see you make a sacrifice that wouldn't bring you what you expect to gain by it," Mangan said. "But, as I say, you won't make any such sacrifice. You have had your brain turned by a pretty pair of eyes—perhaps by an elegant figure—and you have been troubled and dissatisfied and dreaming dreams."
"If that is your conclusion and summing-up of the whole matter," Lionel said, with studied indifference, "perhaps you will offer me a drink, and I'll have a cigarette, and we can talk about something on which we are likely to agree."
"I'm sure I beg your pardon," Mangan said, with a laugh; and he went and brought forth what modest stores he had, and he was quite willing that the conversation should flow into another channel.
And little did Lionel know that at this very moment there was something awaiting him at his own rooms that would (far more effectually than any reasoning and plain speaking) banish from
his mind, for the moment at least, all those restless aspirations and vague regrets. When eventually he arrived in Piccadilly and went up-stairs, he was not expecting any letters, this being Sunday; and as there was on the table only a small parcel, he would probably have left that unheeded till the morning (no doubt it was a pair of worked slippers, or a couple of ivory-backed brushes, or something of the kind) but that in passing he happened to glance at the note on the top of it, and he observed that the handwriting was foreign. He took it up carelessly and opened it; his carelessness soon vanished. The message was from Mlle. Girond, and it was in French:
"Dear Mr. Moore,—To-day Mrs. Grey and I have called twice at your apartments, but in vain, and now I leave this letter for you. It is frightful, what has happened. Nina has gone, no one knows where; we can hear nothing of her. This morning when I came down to her room she was gone; there was a letter for me, one for Mr. Lehmann, one for Miss Constance, asking her to be ready to sing to-morrow night, another for Mrs. Grey, with money for the apartments until the end of the month, and also there was this little packet for you. In her letter to me she asks me to see them all delivered. During the night she must have made these arrangements; in the morning she is gone! I am in despair; I know not what to do. Will you have the goodness to come down to-morrow as soon as possible?
"Estelle."
And then mechanically he drew a chair to the table, and sat down and pulled the small package towards him; perhaps the contents might help to explain this extraordinary thing that had occurred. But the moment that he took the lid off the pasteboard box he was more bewildered than ever; for the first glimpse told him that Nina had returned to him all the little presents he had made to her in careless moments.
"Nina!" he said, under his voice, in a tone of indignant reproach.
Yes, here was every one of them, from the enclasped loving-cup to the chance trinkets he had purchased for her just as they happened to attract his eye. He took them all out; there was no letter, no message of any kind. And then he asked himself, almost angrily, what sort of mad freak was this. Had the wayward and petulant Nina—forgetting all the suave and gracious demeanor she had been teaching herself since she came to England—had she run away in a fit of temper, breaking her engagement at the theatre, and causing alarm and anxiety to her friends,