“I’ve told you all about that.”
“Then you don’t. . . . Yes or No? It’s a matter of two lives.”
“I’ve tried and I will try again.”
“But Yes or No?” he persisted.
“No,” she said.
Again he took her hands and kissed them.
“That ends it. If I married you, my dear, I should indeed be a Soldier of Fortune, and you would have every reason to despise me. Now it is really good-bye.”
Her gaze followed him until he disappeared into the hotel. Then she moved slowly to the balustrade baking in the sunshine, and leaning both elbows on it stared through a blur of tears at the detested beauty of the world.
CHAPTER XXI
FORTINBRAS paced the deck of the homeward bound steamer deep in thought. He still wore the costume of the elderly cabinet minister; but his air was that of the cabinet minister returning to a wrecked ministry. His broad shoulders were rounded and bent; his face had fallen from its benevolent folds into fleshy haggardness. He felt old; he felt inexpressibly lonely. He had not repeated the social experiment of the voyage out. Save to his Dutch and Russian table neighbours he had not the heart to speak to any one. A deep melancholy enwrapped him. After his philosophical communion with the sage Abu Mohammed he shrank from platitudinous commerce with the profane. It was for the heart and not for the mind that he craved companionship. He was travelling (second-class, for economy’s sake) back to the old half-charlatan life. For all one’s learning and wisdom, one cannot easily embark on a new career in the middle-fifties. He must be Marchand de Bonheur to the end.