'
While I was accompanying them through the corridors of the hotel,
Cyril said: 'You say he is not in love with his model? Don't you see
the sulky looks he gives me? I was the innocent cause of an unlucky
catastrophe with her. I'll tell you about that, however, another
time. Good-bye; I'm off to Paris.'
'When you return to London,' I said to Cyril, 'I wish to consult you
upon, a matter that concerns me deeply.'
II
On re-entering my room, as I stood and gazed at my father's book _The
Veiled Queen_, I understood something about that fascination which
the bird feels who goes fluttering to the serpent's jaws from sheer
repulsion. 'Am I indeed,' I asked myself, 'that same Darwinian
student who in Switzerland not long since turned over in scorn these
pages, where are enshrined superstitious stories as gross as any of
those told in Fenella Stanley's ignorant letters?'
In a chapter on 'Love and Death' certain passages showed me how great
must have been the influence of this book on Wilderspin, and I no
longer wondered at what the painter had told me in Wales.
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