It is curious that I cannot recall Pasquale having alluded, in Carlotta’s presence, to our early days.  It was on my tongue to ask when he committed the mendacity—­for in that school not only did the assistant masters not have the power of the cane, but Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was exempt from corporal punishment—­when they both rose flushed from their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from Pasquale put the question out of my head.

All this is unimportant.  The main result of Pasquale’s visit this evening is a discovery.

Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the non-moral intellect’s sinister attribution of motives?

“A baby in long clothes would have seen through it,” said Pasquale.  “Lord bless you, if I were in your position I would go on board that yacht, I’d make violent love to every female there, like the gentleman in Mr. Wycherley’s comedy, I’d fill a salmon fly-book with samples of their hair, I’d make them hate one another like poison, and at the end of the voyage I’d announce my engagement to Carlotta, and when they all came to the wedding I’d make the fly-book the most conspicuous of wedding presents on the table, from the bridegroom to the bride.  By George!  I’d cure them of the taste for man-hunting!”

I wonder what impelled me to tell Pasquale of the proposed yachting cruise?  We sat smoking by the open window, long after Carlotta had been sent to bed, and looking at a full moon sailing over the tops of the trees in the park; enveloped in that sensuous atmosphere of a warm summer night which induces a languor in the body and in the will.  On such a night as this young Lorenzo, if he happens to have Jessica by his side, makes a confounded idiot of himself, to his life’s undoing; and on such a night as this a reserved philosopher commits the folly of discussing his private affairs with a Sebastian Pasquale.

But if he is correct in his surmise, I am much beholden to the relaxing influences of the night.  I have been warned of perils that encompass me:  perils that would infest the base and insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that man could build on the edge of the Regent’s Park.  A woman with a Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by balloon to my turret window.  Is it not my Aunt Jessica’s design melodramatically to abduct me in a yacht?

“Once aboard the pirate lugger, and the man is ours!” she cries.

But the man is not coming aboard the pirate lugger.  He is going to keep as far as he possibly can from the shore.  Neither is he to be lured into bringing his lovely Mohammedan ward with him, as an evidence of good faith and unimpeachable morals.  They can regard her as a Mohammedan ward or a houri or a Princess of Babylon, just as they choose.

Pasquale must be right.  A hundred remembered incidents go to prove it.  I recollect now that Judith has rallied me on my obtuseness.