“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.” The retort was obvious; but apparently it was not anticipated. Mrs. Fontaine flushed scarlet at the sneer. She looked at him hard-eyed, and said, with set teeth: “I wish to God I were.” CHAPTER XIV Something was wrong with Tommy Burgrave. Instead of flinging excited hands in the direction of splendid equipage or beautiful woman, he sat glum by Clementina’s side, while the most dazzling procession in Europe passed before his eyes. Of course it was a little cockneyfied to sit on a public bench on the edge of the great Avenue of the Champs Elysées; but Clementina knew that consciousness of cockneydom would not disturb the serenity of Tommy’s soul. Something else was the matter. He was ill at ease. Gloom darkened his brow and care perched on his shoulders. The car of thirty-five million dove-power which had brought the wanderers, the day before, to Paris, had deposited Etta Concannon at the house of some friends for a few hours’ visit, and Tommy and Clementina at Ledoyen’s, where they had lunched. It was over the _truite à la gelée_ that Tommy’s conversation had begun to flag. His melancholy deepened as the meal proceeded. When they strolled, after lunch; across to the Avenue, his face assumed an expression of acute misery. He sat forward, elbows on knees, and traced sad diagrams on the gravel with the point of his cane. “My good Tommy,” said Clementina, at last—what on earth was the matter with the boy?—“you look as merry as a museum.”