“You stole that from Heine,” said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, “and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own.”

“My good Ordeyne,” said he, “did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?”

“You know much more about the matter than I do,” I replied, and Pasquale laughed.

It has been a pleasure to see him again—­a creature of abounding vitality whom time cannot alter.  He is as lithe-limbed as when he was a boy, and as lithe-witted.  I don’t know how his consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette’s cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account of his mirific adventures in foreign cities.  Among other things, he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera of Bulgarian politics.  I also heard of the Viennese dancer.  My own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared with his was that of a caged canary compared with a sparrowhawk’s.  Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and on certain matters I am silent.  He also gesticulates freely, a thing which is totally foreign to my nature.  As Judith would say, he has a temperament.  His moustaches curl fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes.  Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person.  By no conceivable freak of outer circumstance could I have the adventures of Pasquale.

And yet he thinks them tame!  Lord!  If I found myself hatching conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around me.

“But man alive!” I cried.  “What in the name of tornadoes do you want?”

“I want to fight,” said he.  “The earth has grown too grey and peaceful.  Life is anaemic.  We need colour—­good red splashes of it—­good wholesome bloodshed.”

Said I, “All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull the noses of all the lieutenants you see there.  In that way you’ll get as much gore as your heart could desire.”

“By Jove!” said he, springing to his feet.  “What a cause for a man to devote his life to—­the extermination of Prussian lieutenants!”

I leaned back in my arm-chair—­it was after dinner—­and smiled at his vehemence.  The ordinary man does not leap about like that during digestion.

“You would have been happy as an Uscoque,” said I. (I have just finished the prim narrative.)

“What’s that?” he asked.  I told him.