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“You’re going to write to him why you give it up!” he exclaimed.

“I shall make no report of espionage,” I answered, with, perhaps, some bitterness, “and I will leave the letter for you to read and to send, of yourself. It shall only tell him that as a man of honour I cannot keep a position for which I have no qualification.”

I was going to open the door, bidding him adieu, when he called out to me.

“Look here!” he said, and he jumped out of bed in his pajamas and came quickly, and held out his hand. “Look here, Ansolini, don’t take it that way. I know you’ve had pretty hard times, and if you’ll stay, I’ll get good. I’ll go to the Louvre with you this afternoon; we’ll dine at one of the Duval restaurants, and go to that new religious tragedy afterwards. If you like, we’ll leave Paris to-morrow. There’s a little too much movement here, maybe. For God’s sake, let your hair grow, and we’ll go down to Italy and study bones and ruins and delight the aged parent! — It’s all right, isn’t it?”

I shook the hand of that kind Poor Jr. with a feeling in my heart that kept me from saying how greatly I thanked him–and I was sure that I could do anything for him in the world!

Chapter Five

Three days later saw us on the pretty waters of Lake Leman, in the bright weather when Mont Blanc heaves his great bare shoulders of ice miles into the blue sky, with no mist-cloak about him.

Sailing that lake in the cool morning, what a contrast to the champagne houpla nights of Paris! And how docile was my pupil! He suffered me to lead him through the Castle of Chillon like a new-born lamb, and even would not play the little horses in the Kursaal at Geneva, although, perhaps, that was because the stakes were not high enough to interest him. He was nearly always silent, and, from the moment of our departure from Paris, had fallen into dreamfulness, such as would come over myself at the thought of the beautiful lady. It touched my heart to find how he was ready with acquiescence to the slightest suggestion of mine, and, if it had been the season, I am almost credulous that I could have conducted him to Baireuth to hear Parsifal!

There were times when his mood of gentle sorrow was so like mine that I wondered if he, too, knew a grey pongee skirt. I wondered over this so much, and so marvellingly, also, because of the change in him, that at last I asked him.

We had gone to Lucerne; it was clear moonlight, and we smoked on our little balcony at the Schweitzerhof, puffing our small clouds in the enormous face of the strangest panorama of the world, that august disturbation of the earth by gods in battle, left to be a land of tragic fables since before Pilate was there, and remaining the same after William Tell was not. I sat looking up at the mountains, and he leaned on the rail, looking down at the lake. Somewhere a woman was singing from Pagliacci, and I slowly arrived at a consciousness that I had sighed aloud once or twice, not so much sadly, as of longing to see that lady, and that my companion had permitted similar sounds to escape him, but more mournfully. It was then that I asked him, in earnestness, yet with the manner of making a joke, if he did not think often of some one in North America.

“Do you believe that could be, and I making the disturbance I did in Paris?” he returned.

“Yes,” I told him, “if you are trying to forget her.”

“I should think it might look more as if I were trying to forget that I wasn’t good enough for her and that she knew it!”