“Even saving a pretty woman’s soul?  No, Joseph, to do you justice, I don’t.  But I warn you, you may not have much more time before you to finish your good work.  Innocentina’s employer and I may part company before long.”  Though I smiled, I spoke heavily.

Joseph’s melancholy dark face flushed, and the light died out of his eyes.  “Thank you, Monsieur, I will do my best to be quick,” said he, as if it had been a question of saddling Finois, instead of rescuing a young lady from the clutches of the Scarlet Woman.  Whatever progress he had really been making with Innocentina’s soul, it was clear that she had been getting in some deadly work upon his honest heart.

CHAPTER XX

The Great Paolo

     “Condescension is an excellent thing; but it is strange how
     one-sided the pleasure of it is.”—­R.L.  STEVENSON.

After I went to bed that night, I thought long and bitterly of the Little Pal’s defection.  Mentally I addressed him as a young gazelle who had gladdened me with his soft dark eye, only to withdraw the light of that orb when it was most needed.  As he apparently wished me to understand that, now he was on with Gaeta, he would fain be off with me, I would take him not only at his word, but before it.  I would make an excuse to avoid stopping at the Contessa’s villa, but would let him revel there alone in his glory; if one did not count the Di Nivolis.

Next morning we met by appointment at eight o’clock, and tried to behave as if nothing had happened; but I realised that I would have been a dead failure as an actor.  I was grumpy and glum, and the coaxing, child-like ways which the Boy used for my beguiling were in vain.  I did not say anything about my change of plans for Aix, but I brooded darkly upon them throughout the day, my mood eating away all pleasure in the charming scenery through which we passed, as a black worm eats into the heart of a cherry.

We had about twenty-nine kilometres to go, and by the time that the shadows were growing long and blue, we were approaching Aix-les-Bains.  Nature had gone back to the simple apparel of her youth, here.  She was idyllic and charming, but we were not to ask of her any more sensational splendours, by way of costume, for she had not brought them with her in her dress-basket.  There were near green hills, and far blue mountains, and certain rocky eminences in the middle distance, but nothing of grandeur.  Poplars marched along with us on either side, primly on guard, and puritanical, though all the while their myriad little fingers seemed to twinkle over the keyboard of an invisible piano, playing a rapid waltz.

Then we came at last into Aix-les-Bains, where I had spent a merry month during a “long,” in Oxford days.  I had not been back since.

Already the height of the season was over, for it was September now, but the gay little watering-place seemed crowded still, and in our knickerbockers, with our pack-mule and donkeys, and their attendants, we must have added a fantastic note to the dance-music which the very breezes play among tree-branches at light-hearted Aix.