Gerard could not but remember the first meeting of this tragic couple in the Villa Iris. Paul Ravenel had stood behind Marguerite’s chair, and without a word, without even turning her head to see who it was that stood behind her, she had risen from the midst of the Dagoes and Levantines, as at an order given. She had fallen into step at his side, and no word had as yet passed between them. Gerard de Montignac recollected that, even then, a little pang of jealousy had stabbed him and sharply enough to send him straight out of the cabaret.
“Yes . . . yes,” he said, slowly. “I had never spoken to you then, had I? It wasn’t until afterwards . . .” He was thinking and drawing some queer sort of balm from the thought, that Marguerite had not so much flatly refused him his two days as set her heart on Paul Ravenel before she had met him. If it had been he, for instance, who had stood behind Marguerite’s chair and silently called her! But, then, he hadn’t. He had gone away and left the field clear for Paul Ravenel. Other memories came back to him to assuage his wrath.
“After all, it was I who brought you and Ravenel together,” he said. “For it was I who persuaded him to come with me on that first night to the Villa Iris.”
“Yes!” Marguerite drew in her breath sharply. “He told me that he almost didn’t come.”
It would have been better if he had not come, if he had stayed quietly in his house and gone on with his report. So her judgment told her. But she could never imagine those moments during which Paul had stood in doubt, without picturing them so vividly that she had a quiver of fear lest he should decide not to come.
“It was I, too, who sent Paul Ravenel to you at the end,” Gerard de Montignac continued; and as Marguerite drew her brows together in a wrinkle of perplexity, “Yes,” he assured her. “The night after you didn’t want to speak to me any more, I went back to the Villa Iris to find you. Did you know that? Yes, I was leaving the next morning with the advance guard for Fez. I didn’t know what might happen on the march. I wanted to make friends with you again, so that if anything did happen to me, you wouldn’t have any bitter memories of me.”
“That was a kind thought,” said Marguerite.