“You are mistaken,” said the other with some dignity.
“I do not talk too much.
I never have talked too much.”
He laid his cards on the table, picked up his glass and drained it.
“Monsieur, I like you.
I think I shall tell you a great secret.”
“I advise you to keep it to yourself,” said Pierre, who was beginning to be bored.
He glanced again at his watch.
It was a quarter to six.
“Right.
Unquestionably right,” said the stranger.
“The greatest of all virtues is caution.”
He extended his arm as though to pluck a measure of that quality from the thick, damp air.
“At the present moment I am a glowing example of the value of caution.
It is the sine qua non of success.
My motto is
‘In words bold, in action prudent.’
Caution!
Prudence!
I thank you, my friend.”
This, being somewhat at variance with Pierre’s theory of life, slightly aroused him.
“But one cannot be an absolute coward,” he protested.
“Eh, bien,” returned the other, raising his brows in scorn at the bare suggestion, “one is expected to be a man.
But what would you have?
There are times—there is always one’s safety.
Preservation is the first law of existence. Now I, for instance”—he leaned forward and finished in a confidential whisper—“would never think of blaming a man for obtaining a substitute to fight a duel for him.
A mere matter of caution.
Would you?”
Pierre felt a choking lump rise to his throat, and when he tried to speak found himself unable to open his mouth.
All was known!
He was lost!
This drunken fellow—who probably was not drunk at all—who was he?
Undoubtedly, Phillips had betrayed him.
And then, as he sat stunned by surprise, the other continued:
“The truth is—you see, my friend, I trust you, and I want your opinion—that is exactly what I have done myself.
It was to be at six o’clock,” he said.
“And he—that fool of a Dumain—proposed for us to mask. That was what gave me the idea.”
A thought darted into Pierre’s brain like a leaping flame, and forced from him an unguarded exclamation:
“Aha!
Lamon!”
The other glanced up with quick suspicion.
“How do you know that?” he demanded thickly.
But Pierre had had a second in which to recover his wits.
“A man as famous as you?” he asked in a tone of surprise. “Everyone knows Lamon.”
The uneasiness on the other’s face gave way to a fatuous smile.
“Perhaps,” he admitted.
Pierre’s brain, always nimble in an emergency, was working rapidly.
He glanced at his watch: there still remained ten minutes before Phillips could be expected to arrive.
As for this drunken Lamon, there was nothing to be feared from him.
Then a new fear assailed him.