dark combination of traitor and pickpocket when I thought of that girl?”
“I seem to remember the expression,” said Eugene.
“How do you feel when you think of her just now?”
His friend made no direct reply, but observed, after a few whiffs of his cigar, “Don’t mistake the situation. There is no better girl in all this London than Lizzie Hexam. There is no better among my people at home; no better among your people.”
“Granted. What follows?”
“There,” said Eugene, looking after him dubiously as he paced away to the other end of the room, “you put me again upon guessing the riddle that I have given up.”
“Eugene, do you design to capture and desert this girl?”
“My dear fellow, no.”
“Do you design to marry her?”
“My dear fellow, no.”
“Do you design to pursue her?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t design anything. I have no design whatever. I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily abandon it, exhausted by the operation.”
“Oh Eugene, Eugene!”
“My dear Mortimer, not that tone of melancholy reproach, I entreat. What can I do more than tell you all I know, and acknowledge my