The Englishman scowled.  “You delight, Monsieur, in touching the raw spots—­However, I daresay matters will go rippingly.”  He took the bills and counted them into his own purse.  “A chap can’t afford to be too sentimental or thin-skinned.”  He was thinking of a couple of clubs in Cairo from which he had been asked to resign.  Then he laughed callously as he added aloud:  “You see there’s a regiment stationed there, just now, which I’d rather not meet.  I used to belong to its mess—­once upon a time.”

Jusseret looked up at the renegade, then with a cynical laugh he rose.

“These little matters are inconvenient,” he admitted, “but embarrassments beset one everywhere.  If one turns aside to avoid his old regiment, who knows but he may meet his tailor insistent upon payment—­or the lady who was once his wife?”

He lighted a cigarette, then with the refined cruelty that enjoyed torturing a victim who could not afford to resent his brutality, he added: 

“But these army regulations are extremely annoying, I daresay—­these rules which proclaim it infamous to recognize one who—­who has, under certain circumstances, ceased to be a brother-officer.”

The Englishman was leaning across the table, his cheek-bones red and his eyes dangerous.

“By God, Jusseret, don’t go too far!” he cautioned.

The Frenchman raised his hands in an apologetic gesture, but his eyes still held a trace of the malevolent smile.

“A thousand pardons, my dear Martin,” he begged.  “I meant only to be sympathetic.”

CHAPTER XX

THE DEATH Of ROMANCE IS DEPLORED

“And yet,” declared young Harcourt, “if there still survives, anywhere in the world, a vestige of Romance, this should be her refuge; her last stand against the encroachments of the commonplace.”

He spoke animatedly, with the double eagerness of a boy and an artist, sweeping one hand outward in an argumentative gesture.  It was a gesture which seemed to submit in evidence all the palpitating colors of Capri sunning herself among her rocks:  all the sparkle and glitter of the Bay of Naples spreading away to the nebulous line where Ischia bulked herself in mist against the horizon:  all the majesty of the cone where the fires of Vesuvius lay sleeping.

Across the table Sir Manuel Blanco shrugged his broad shoulders.

Benton lighted a cigarette, and a smile, scarcely indicative of frank amusement, flickered in his eyes.

“Do you hold that Romance is on the run?” he queried.

“Where do you find it nowadays?” demanded the boy in flannels.  “There!” With the violence of disgust he slammed a Baedeker of Southern Italy down upon the table.  “That is the way we see the world in these days!  We go back with souvenir postcards instead of experiences, and when we get home we have just been to a lot of tramped-over places.  I’ll wager that a handful of this copper junk they call money over here, would buy in a bull market all the real adventure any of us will ever know.”