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"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner. He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
He was not thought a shining light among the adepts. Ortholani was another pretender, of whom nothing is known, but that he exercised the arts of alchymy and astrology at Paris, shortly before the time of Nicholas Flamel. His work on the practice of alchymy was written in that city in 1358. Isaac of Holland wrote, it is supposed, about this time; and his son also devoted himself to the science.
Flamel, always at his best in Alexa's presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block.
The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual.
"A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?" "Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him by one person, you understand; a woman, in fact " "Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently. Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were published." Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I suppose?"
She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me because I read her life last year." "Her life? Where did you get that?" "Someone lent it to me when it came out Mr. Flamel, I think."
It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her " "Did he?" came from Flamel. "He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully... he wouldn't read it... he didn't want me to read it.
Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him.... When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel. HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant air of penetration. Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not even the publishers; so they tell me at least." "So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs.
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