Hugo | Page 8

of that! What have you to report?'
'Miss Payne left at 2.15, whipped round to the flats entrance, took the
lift to the top-floor, went into Mr. Francis Tudor's flat.'
'What's that you say? Whose flat?' cried Hugo.
'Mr. Francis Tudor's, sir.'
Mr. Tudor was famous as the tenant of the suite rented at two thousand
a year; he had a reputation for being artistic, sybaritic, and something in
the inner ring of the City.
'Ah!' said Hugo. 'Perhaps she is a friend of one of Mr. Tudor's--'
'Servants,' he was about to say, but the idea of Miss Payne being on
terms of equality with a menial was not pleasant to him, and he
stopped.
'No, sir,' said Albert Shawn, unmoved. 'She is not, because Mr. Tudor
shunted out all his servants soon afterwards. Miss Payne was shown
into his study. She had her tea there, and her dinner. The Hugo
half-guinea dinner was ordered late by telephone for two persons, and
rushed up at eight o'clock.'
'I wonder Mr. Tudor didn't order an orchestra with the dinner,' said
Hugo grimly. It was a sublime effort on his part to be his natural self.
'I waited for Miss Payne to leave,' continued Albert Shawn. 'That's why
I'm so late.'

'And what time did she leave?'
'She hasn't left,' said Albert Shawn.
CHAPTER IV
CAMILLA
Hugo dismissed Albert, with orders to continue his vigil, and then he
rang for Simon.
'Do you think I might have some tea?' he asked.
'I am disposed to think you might, sir,' said Simon the cellarer. 'It is
eight days since you indulged after dinner.'
'Bring me one cup, then, poured out.'
He was profoundly disturbed by Albert's news. He was, in fact,
miserable. He had a physical pain in the region of the heart. He wished
he could step off Love as one steps off an omnibus, but he found that
Love resembled an express train more than an omnibus.
'Can she be secretly married to him?' he demanded half aloud, sipping
at the tea.
The idea soothed him exactly as much as it alarmed him.
'The question is,' he murmured angrily, 'am I or am I not an ass?... At
my age!'
He felt vaguely that he was not, that he was rather a splendid and
Byronic figure in the grip of tremendous emotions.
Having regretfully finished the tea, he unlocked a bookcase, and picked
out at random a volume of Boswell's 'Johnson.' It was the modern
Oxford edition--the only edition worthy of a true amateur--bound by
Rivière. Like all wise and lettered men, Hugo consulted Boswell in the
grave crises of life, and to-night he happened upon the venerable

Johnson's remark: 'Sir, I would be content to spend the remainder of my
existence driving about in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.'
He leaned back in his chair and laughed. 'In the whole history of
mankind,' he asserted to the dome, 'there have only been two really
sensible men. Solomon was one, and Johnson the other.'
He restored the book to its place, and sat down to the piano-player, and
in a moment the overture to 'Tannhäuser,' that sublime failure to prove
that passion is folly, filled the vast apartment. The rushing violin
passages, and every call of Aphrodite, intoxicated his soul and raised
his spirits till he knew with the certainty of a fully-aroused instinct that
Camilla Payne must be his. He became optimistic on all points.
'A lady insists on seeing you, sir,' said Simon Shawn, intruding upon
the Pilgrims' Chant.
'She may insist,' Hugo answered lightly. 'But it all depends who she is.
I'm--'
He stopped, for the insisting lady had entered.
It was Camilla.
He jumped up. Never before in his career had he been so astounded,
staggered, charmed, enchanted, dazzled, and completely silenced.
'Miss Payne?' he gasped after a prolonged pause.
Simon Shawn effaced himself.
'Yes, Mr. Hugo.'
'Won't you sit down?'
The singular prevalence of beautiful women in England is only
appreciated properly by Englishmen who have lived abroad, and these
alone know also that in no other country is beauty wasted by women as
it is wasted in England. Camilla was beautiful, and supremely beautiful;

she was tall, well and generously formed, graceful, fair, with fine eyes
and fine dark chestnut hair; her absolutely regular features had the
proud Tennysonian cast. But the coldness of Tennysonian damsels was
not hers. Whether she had Latin blood in her veins, or whether Nature
had peculiarly gifted her out of sheer caprice, she possessed in a high
degree that indescribable demeanour, at once a defiance and a surrender,
a question and an answer, a confession and a denial, which is the
universal weapon of women of Latin race in the battle of the sexes, but
of which Englishwomen seem to