He might have retired more conventionally. He might have had a dismal explanatory interview with Joanna, and ordered a fly to convey himself and his luggage to the Railway Station the next morning. Perhaps if Joanna had found him in the November Sunday afternoon garden this might have occurred. But Joanna did not find him. His temperament found him instead; and when you have a temperament like Paragot's, it plays the very deuce with convention. It drew him out of the garden, across the Channel and into the society of Bubu le Vainqueur. But, all the same, in the essential act of leaving Melford, Paragot behaved like the man of fine honour I shall always maintain him to be.
How many men of speckless reputation, though feeling the pinch of poverty, would not have married Joanna for the great wealth her husband left behind? Answer me that.
I know that Joanna wept bitterly over her lost romance. But she has owned to me that the words written on a scrap of paper by Paragot and posted from London were tragically true:
"My dear. It is only the shadows of our past selves that love. You and I are strangers to each other. To continue this sweet pretence of love is a mockery of the Holiest. God bless you. Gaston."
"If you love a Dream Woman," said Paragot, "let her stay the divine Woman of the Dream. To awaken and clasp flesh and blood, no matter how delicately tender, and find that love has sped at the dawn is a misery too deep for tears."
And Paragot, lying unshaven, unwashed, in grimy shirt and trousers, smoked silently and stared into a future in which the dear sweet Dream Woman with "the little feet so adored" would never, never again have a place.
"If I had a coat to my back," said he, after nearly half an hour's silence, "I verily believe I would go to the Pont Neuf and talk to Henri Quatre."
Le Fou Rire had given me a commission for a front page in colours; and I was deep in the disreputable task on the following evening when Paragot appeared in my attic. He wore a jacket, his bag having arrived from Melford.
"My soul hungers," said he, "for the Café Delphine, and my throat thirsts for sociable alcohol. If you can cease the prostitution of your art to a salacious public for an hour or two, I shall be very glad of your company."