“It’s distasteful,” he interrupted, “and there’s an end of it.”
“As you will,” said Huckaby, for the moment uncertain.
Mrs. Fontaine approached them smiling, provocative in the dainty candour of her white dress and hat.
“Well? Have you decided?”
Quixtus paused for the fraction of a second. The lady swept him with her dreamy glance. A modern Merlin, he yielded. This delicious wickedness at last on foot, Sardanel and all his spoils of Mexico could go hang.
“For the afternoon,” said he, “I am your humble disciple.”
They went forth together, outwardly as gay a company as ever issued through the great gates of the Hôtel Continental into the fairyland of Paris; inwardly, save one of their number, psychological complexities as dark as any that have emerged into its mocking and inscrutable spirit. Of the three, Quixtus, the tender-hearted scholar of darkened mind, who could no more have broken a woman’s heart than have trampled on a baby, pathetically bent on his intellectually conceived career of Evil and entirely unconscious of being himself the dupe and victim—of the three, Quixtus was certainly the happiest. Huckaby, touched with shame, avoided meeting his accomplice’s eye. He walked in front with Lady Louisa, finding refuge in her placid dulness.
Once during the afternoon, when Lena Fontaine found herself for a moment by his side, she laughed cynically.
“Do you know what you two remind me of? Martha and Mephistopheles.”
“And you are Gretchen to the life.”