Septimus Part 3

"I wish you would," said he, drawing a handful from his jacket pocket. "I should be so much happier."

"You can hardly be such a gambler," she laughed.

"Oh, no! It's not that at all. Gambling bores me."

"Why do you play, then?"

"I don't. I staked that louis because I wanted to see whether I should be interested. I wasn't, as I began to think about the guns. Have you had breakfast?"

Again Zora was startled. A sane man does not talk of breakfasting at nine o'clock in the evening. But if he were a lunatic perhaps it were wise to humor him.

"Yes," she said. "Have you?"

"No. I've only just got up."

"Do you mean to say you've been asleep all day?"

"What's the noisy day made for?"

"Let us sit down," said Zora.

They found one of the crimson couches by the wall vacant, and sat down.

Zora regarded him curiously.

"Why should you be happier if I took care of your money?"

"I shouldn't spend it. I might meet a man who wanted to sell me a gas-engine."

"But you needn't buy it."

"These fellows are so persuasive, you see. At Rotterdam last year, a man made me buy a second-hand dentist's chair."

"Are you a dentist?" asked Zora.

"Lord, no! If I were I could have used the horrible chair."

"What did you do with it?"

"I had it packed up and despatched, carriage paid, to an imaginary person at Singapore."

He made this announcement in his tired, gentle manner, without the flicker of a smile. He added, reflectively--

"That sort of thing becomes expensive. Don't you find it so?"

"I would defy anybody to sell me a thing I didn't want," she replied.

"Ah, that," said he with a glance of wistful admiration, "that is because you have red hair."

If any other strange male had talked about her hair, Zora Middlemist would have drawn herself up in Junoesque majesty and blighted him with a glance.

She had done with men and their compliments forever. In that she prided herself on her Amazonianism. But she could not be angry with the inconclusive being to whom she was talking. As well resent the ingenuous remarks of a four-year-old child.

"What has my red hair to do with it?" she asked pleasantly.

"It was a red-haired man who sold me the dentist's chair."

"Oh!" said Zora, nonplussed.

There was a pause. The man leaned back, embracing one knee with both hands.

They were nerveless, indeterminate hands, with long fingers, such as are in the habit of dropping things. Zora wondered how they supported his knee.

For some time he stared into vacancy, his pale-blue eyes adream. Zora laughed.

"Guns?" she asked.

"No," said he, awaking to her presence. "Perambulators."

She rose. "I thought you might be thinking of breakfast. I must be going back to my hotel. These rooms are too hot and horrible. Good night."

"I will see you to the lift, if you'll allow me," he said politely.

She graciously a.s.sented and they left the rooms together. In the atrium she changed her mind about the lift. She would leave the Casino by the main entrance and walk over to the Hotel de Paris for the sake of a breath of fresh air. At the top of the steps she paused and filled her lungs. It was a still, moonless night, and the stars hung low down, like diamonds on a canopy of black velvet. They made the flaring lights of the terrace of the Hotel and Cafe de Paris look tawdry and meretricious.

"I hate them," she said, pointing to the latter.

"Stars are better," said her companion.

She turned on him swiftly.

"How did you know I was making comparisons?"

"I felt it," he murmured.

They walked slowly down the steps. At the bottom a carriage and pair seemed to rise mysteriously out of the earth.

"'Ave a drive? Ver' good carriage," said a voice out of the dimness. Monte Carlo cabmen are unerring in their divination of the Anglo-Saxon.

Why not? The suggestion awoke in her an instant craving for the true beauty of the land. It was unconventional, audacious, crazy. But, again, why not?

Zora Middlemist was answerable for her actions to no man or woman alive.

Why not drink a great draught of the freedom that was hers? What did it matter that the man was a stranger? All the more daring the adventure. Her heart beat gladly. But chaste women, like children, know instinctively the man they can trust.

"Shall we?"

"Drive?"

"Yes--unless--" a thought suddenly striking her--"unless you want to go back to your friends."

"Good Lord!" said he, aghast, as if she were accusing him of criminal a.s.sociations. "I have no friends."

"Then come."