XXVII.

Returned, Eva vanished mysteriously and came back with a book and asked them to write in her album.

“All these your admirers, Eva?” Ottercove scanned the pages wearily. “Hello what’s this?

“‘_O Eva, O Eva,_ _I love you so mighty,_ _I wish my pyjama was_ _Next to your nighty._’

“Whoever wrote this, Eva?”

“A little schoolboy in Ireland.”

“Shame!”

“He loved me.”

“That’s something.”

Frank the while was scanning the pages of _The Sunday Runner_, Ottercove’s youngest and favourite offspring. “Rotten newspaper,” he said, as if to himself, but loud enough for Ottercove to hear him. “Nothing of me in it.”

“I am taking you to-night to Maxime’s. And now,” said Lord Ottercove, “I’ll jump into bed. Good-night to you.”

And, to precipitate their going, he was already removing his tie and collar.

That night at Maxime’s Eva looked exquisite. She had not, Frank felt, before now expanded her more expensive potentialities. Now she looked like really expanding them. And Lord Ottercove looked very much like encouraging her to expand them. She was a plant that suddenly flowered when put in a vase of champagne. The competition for her on the part of the three men developed into rapid fire. “Now then, Eva, why this hesitation?” Ottercove demanded. “I am a man of brains. I am a man of money. I am a man of love and a capacity to requite love once it is lavished on me tit for tat. _Quid pro quo._”

“Do you love me, Rex?”

He smote the table. “With all my heart.”

“Truly?”

“I swear by my love for my newspapers or may God strike me dead!”

“And you, Ferdinand?”

“Can you ask? What of my courage? Am I not setting out all alone against all his newspapers, with possibly the other newspaper lord at the back of him--in fact, the whole of the more sinister Press of Great Britain against me!”

Lord Ottercove, gripping his knife and fork in his two fists--he was in high spirits to-night--leaned back and laughed. There was in his gesture all the self-confidence and abandon of men who had climbed to the top of the ladder. On the top of the ladder one is apt to let oneself go. (Which, by no means, applies to all ladders. One’s solicitude for one’s fate on most ladders is never so keen as on the last rung. But--let us be perfectly clear--it is a solicitude different in kind from that which is experienced by people passing _under_ a ladder.)

“And you, Chris?” she asked. “Will you love me all your life?”

“All my life and fifty years after.”

“You might be Mr. Solberg, the Register of Copyrights at Washington,” said Frank.

“Isn’t Ferdinand beautiful?”

“As beautiful as my nose.”

Lord Ottercove was getting cheerier and cheerier, and he danced less steadily than he was wont to do. “Now, Chris, don’t you make love to Eva. Hands off! you married men! You haven’t been divorced a month. I at least am a bachelor and can marry her to-morrow if the fancy takes us. Can’t I, Eva? I’ll stop that crater mission of yours if you don’t take yourself away in time.” He looked at Eva. “I’ve got to blow him up a bit from time to time, or he gets too cocky, you know.”

“It’s me who will do it,” de Jones said.

“Do what?”

“Blow you all up.”

Lord Ottercove called the waiter and paid. While they were putting on their coats and pushing through the door into the street, de Jones and Frank lingering behind, Lord Ottercove jumped into the car after Eva, slammed the door and drove off.