The city in which he rambled was strange to him, and, according to his fashion when absorbed in thought, he took any turning which suggested itself, and lost himself in a labyrinth of byways. He had done the same kind of thing in a hundred towns and cities without any result worth mentioning, but just for once he was destined to find a purpose wrapped up in the folds of this simple habit.

He was plodding along miserably enough, and did not know whether he were at Naples or the North Pole, when a familiar voice awoke him from his bitter reveries, and he looked about him to discover that he was between a high wall and & hedge of aloes on a strip of gra.s.s which had no pathway on it, and apparently led nowhere. He had a vague idea that he had set out in this direction upon a footpath more or less distinct, and making a _volte-face_, he saw that the path had come to a termination at a door in the high wall a wicket's length behind him.

The voice he had heard was the voice of Gertrude, and the words it had spoken were: 'Ah! but my dear friend, that inevitable, that unceasing isolation of the mind!'

A swift pang of jealousy ran through him, and he listened with an almost fierce anxiety. There was nothing in his nature to induce him to play the eavesdropper, but he could not have refrained from listening just then had it been to save his soul. Some deep undetermined murmur of a voice in answer seemed to reach his ears, but they were drumming so to the startled music of his heart that his sense failed to record it.

He went back swiftly and stealthily to the spot at which the pathway terminated, and there he found an old green-painted door in a small archway in the wall. It half drooped upon its rusty hinges, and across the gap it left between its own rim and the postern, he had view enough to tell him whither his rambling footsteps had led him. He was looking at the terraced gardens in the rear of the Baroness's hotel, and whilst he looked Gertrude herself floated into sight. Some trifle of a lace mantilla was thrown over her head, and in her right hand she balanced a parasol daintily between thumb and finger. Her companion was a man apparently of middle age, frock-coated, silk-hatted, booted and gloved as if for Rotten Row. He bore himself with an air of distinction, and the looker-on saw the gloved hand caress a big moustache of sweeping silver. The owner of the moustache was bending over the Baroness with an unmistakable air of gallant attention, and Paul's blood boiled within him. He had no real sense of the impulse which moved him, and no calculation as to what might happen; but he pushed the door aside, and, entering the garden, walked along the gravelled main path which led to the hotel. He made a feint of holding his head straight, and of looking neither to left nor right, but he watched Gertrude and her companion with a keen sidelong glance. His brisk footstep set a pebble rolling in the pathway, and a second later he heard his own name called. A low-growing orange-tree, all l.u.s.trous with globes of green and gold and shiny leaf.a.ge, had intercepted his view of the pair for just the instant which intervened between the sound and the call.

'Mr. Armstrong,' said Gertrude's voice, 'Mr. Armstrong!' He turned in a pretence of amazement, and, hat in hand, crossed a small s.p.a.ce of turf.

'I had just sent round to you,' said the smiling little lady, 'at your hotel.' She transferred the parasol to her left hand, and held out the right in an almost effusive greeting. 'I suppose you have not been back yet?'

'No,' Paul answered. 'I have been walking and had lost myself, until I recognised the garden through the open door yonder. Then I made sure of myself again, and thought I might secure a short-cut home.'

'How fortunate!' said Gertrude, smiling; 'and how curious, too!' she added. 'At the very moment at which I caught sight of you your name was in my mind. Are you a believer in the Aura, Colonel Brunton--the something which envelops personality and diffuses itself in such a manner that you recognise a friend's presence before you are made aware of it by sight or hearing? Don't you recognise the reality of those things? But, oh, I forgot! You gentlemen are, I am afraid, strangers to each other. This is Colonel Brunton, our great traveller in the Himalayas and Thibet, and this is Mr. Paul Armstrong, the author of I dare not say how many charming books and comedies--Mr. Darco's collaborateur.'

'Whose work,' said Colonel Brunton in a voice typically American, but profoundly deep, 'I have, bafore my trip to Asia, seen performed with a splendid eclaw both in London and New York. I am proud to meet you, Mr.

Armstrong.'

He was a rugged man, brown as a sun-burned brick, with a cascading moustache of silver, jet-black eyebrows, and eyes which danced defiance at his gray hairs and wrinkles. Paul could do no less than accept the hearty hand he offered, and Gertrude set herself to soothe him.

'You know,' she said, laying her finger-tips upon his arm, 'you are a very inattentive cavalier, Mr. Armstrong. Poor Mrs. Diedrich was taken ill so suddenly and alarmingly that I had time to do no more than just to scribble that little hasty note to you. You might at least have paused to make inquiry.'

'That would never have done,' said Paul 'One does not inquire into a lady's decision at any moment.'

He spoke with a capital a.s.sumption of gaiety, but to the keen instinct of that experienced trifler with hearts it was an a.s.sumption only, and Gertrude turned the question with the easy skill of a woman of the world.

'Those geological researches now,' she said, with a charming air of mocking schoolgirl ignorance about such matters. 'Do you really mean to tell me that right away in the Himalayas you found the same little protozoic blot in the same limestone that you find in our own Andes? Has that little creature really built the mountains of the world? Why, it is the story of the Coral Islands over again; but on what an enormous scale, 'Dear me, what creatures of a day we are!'

Colonel Brunton, who, as it appeared, was a member of many learned societies, and a most indefatigable besieger of the world's inaccessible places, turned out to be a man of so much simplicity, sincerity, and charm, and Gertrude drew him to his best so skilfully, that it was not easy to be sulky for a long time together in his society. It was Paul's cue to disguise himself as far as possible, and this delightful American helped him greatly. He could barely think of the man as a rival; he was so very upright, downright complimentary.

'Why, Lord!' he said once in the course of that afternoon's talk, 'when you were in short frocks, and I was over head and ears in love with you----'

The Baroness s.n.a.t.c.hed a fan which girdled her, and tapped him with it reprovingly.

'Well,' he said, twinkling, 'when all is said and done, habit is the conqueror. I got into that habit when you were a baby: twenty years ago, I'll swear, though it's not legitimate, I know, to guess a lady's age.

I've found a new habit since--a Satanic habit--of going to and fro about the earth, and roaming up and down on it, but I have never forgotten the old one.'

The Baroness laughed and made fun of this proclamation, which was accompanied by certain old-fashioned bows and flourishes of deportment.

'But now,' she said, 'I must really run away and look after my patient, and must leave you, gentlemen, to console each other for my loss. I left Mrs. Diedrich asleep, and could just afford to s.n.a.t.c.h half an hour for so old a friend as you, Colonel If you care to come back and have tea with me at six, I shall be glad to meet you, if I may dare run away again. But if I _should_ be compelled to send down my excuses, you will understand.'

She had already started a movement towards the hotel, and the two men sauntered along with her, one on either side. She left them in the flower-perfumed dimness of the shaded hall, and the whole business of the afternoon had by this time so explained and reconciled itself to Paul's mind that he would have been a brute to fret about it longer.

'I say,' said the Colonel, 'I have been for three years outside civilization, and I should like a John Collins. I came here last night by the Messagerie Maritime. They are good people, and they cook as well as anybody can be expected to cook outside the United States, but their ideas of drink are curiously simple. Can you be my guide, Mr.

Armstrong?'

'Need I guide you farther?' asked Paul 'I should fancy that your materials are to be found here in an absurd plenty, and if you have a skilful hand----'

'Sir,' said the Colonel, with a burlesque flourish, interrupting him, 'there is not a man from Marble Head to the Golden Gate who can make a John Collins to compare with mine.'

Paul knew the house, and led his new acquaintance to a shady veranda where a polyglot waiter chipped his ice to his fancy, found him lemon, pounded sugar, fresh mint, square-faced Hollands, and syphon-water, and left the Colonel compounding in a high state of content.

'This is like home,' he said, 'bar the celestial straw, the use of which these blahsted Continentals have not learned. This is quite like home.

Three years I have been roughing it, up hill and down dale, camp and field Seen a little bit o'fightin' on the Burmah side 'long of your British troops.

Mr. Armstrong; better boys I do _not_ want to meet And here's to them and you, sir. But, Lord!'--he caressed his tumbler with a lean brown hand, and looked contemplatively into s.p.a.ce--'I must smoke. Try a Burmese cigarette, sir. Lord 'I land here last night after three years.

I just break my journey on the way to London, and I run against the little girl that broke my heart when I was fifteen years of age, and broke it again when I was one-and-twenty, and would just go on breaking it for the mere fun of the thing for the next million years, if she and me could only live as long.'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Paul, in a cold insolence which made him hot to think of a thousand times later, 'have you been drinking?'

'Well, I guess,' said Mr. Brunton, and, leaning back in his deck-chair, drew a great volume of smoke into his lungs, expelled it in a cloud, and laughed; 'after a three years' drought, the man who is not game to drink deserves to go dry. But, by Heaven, sir, to strike up against that mighty little flirt after a s.p.a.ce of fifteen years--to come across it all again by accident! Look here! I land out of the _Grande Marie de Luxembourg_ at Naples, with no more idea of revivin' old times than of escapin' into the next century, and who's the first person that I meet but little Gertie, and what's the first word that I hear but the isolation of the soul!'

Paul sat in a chill, tense agony.

'I was,' said the Colonel, growing more and more clearly articulate in accordance with his needs, 'about as full up as any Christian need be when I landed, and I was going to bed like a clean Christian gentleman.

Then I ran up against Gertie. I have been Turkish bathed, I have been sluiced and washed and shaved and perfumed, and I can stand and talk straight. What do you say? What would you have said about me amongst the oranges and lemons in the garden there?' He sat up in a momentary fierceness. 'Am I intoxicated, or, at least, was I till I turned the lock-gate winch and set the waters foaming? No, sir, but in that profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.

He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir--he brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make observations of the present case, _I_ am br.i.m.m.i.n.g over, sir.'

The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his original place in Paul's mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to support its own weight. He slipped at the chin, at the mouth, at the base of the nostril, at the eyebrow, and yet, in spite of these deflections from the original, he appeared to recover himself with an extraordinary swiftness at moments, and to be again the alert, adventurous creature of the woods and wilds his extraordinary career proclaimed him.

It was in a moment of supreme sobriety that he touched Paul's arm and said:

'I'll tell you all about little Gertie right away.'

CHAPTER XXIV

The Colonel's capacity for the holding of liquid substances looked abnormal even to a man of Paul's experience.

'Thirst is now a.s.suaged,' he said solemnly at the end of his third deep tumbler, 'and a man may begin to enjoy himself. There ought to be a boy here who can make a c.o.c.ktail.'

He kept the boy fairly busy, and he talked. He had recovered himself curiously, and there was now no more than a hint of coming intoxication in his eye and in his voice. It seemed as if he had arrived at a settled stage, and was able to make a longish stay there.

'You're pretty thick with our little friend, ain't you?' he asked, rolling round in his seat.

'If you are speaking of the lady who left us a little while ago----'

'Why, certainly,' said the Colonel.

'I have the honour of her friendship,' said Paul with an icy air.

The Colonel was no longer smoking, but he chewed the end of his cigar with a lazy appet.i.te, and he smiled.

'Funny little devil she is,' he said contemplatively. 'Women are odd, however you take 'em; but she's odder than odd. By G.o.d, sir, she's odder than d.i.c.k's hat-band! I suppose she wants me to believe that she's forgotten how I bowled her out years ago. Soul! Heart 'It was before she got married. She made me believe that I was the only man she ever came across who had either. There were twenty-three of us met in New York City, and we had a dinner on the strength of it. I was that mad, sir, at the time, I drummed up the whole contingent. I believe that evening left some of us a little sore, but it cured us, and little Gertie had three-and-twenty play-fellows the fewer next morning. And I'm d.a.m.ned if she didn't open fire on me again in the first half-hour after all these years. It's funny, ain't it?'