"We're
all pretty ignorant, I take it!"
They came to a building, old and not without some lingering of
strength and grace. It stood in the angle of two streets and received
sunshine and light as well as cross-tides of sound. The Scot and the
Englishman both lodged here, above a harness-maker and a worker in
fine woods. They passed into the court and to a stair that once had
known a constant, worldly-rich traffic up and down. Now it was still
and twilight, after the streets. Both men had affairs to put in order,
business on hand. They moved now abstractedly, and when Warburton
reached, upon the first landing, the door of his rooms, he turned
aside from Ian with only a negligent, "We'll sup together and say last
things then."
The Scot went on alone to the next landing and his own room. These
were not his usual lodgings in Paris. Agent now of high Jacobite
interests, shuttle sent from conspirers in France to chiefs in
Scotland, on the eve of a departure in disguise, he had broken old
nest and old relations, and was now as a stranger in a city that he
knew well, and where by not a few he was known. The room that he
turned into had little sign of old, well-liked occupancy; the servant
who at his call entered from a smaller chamber was not the man to whom
he was used, but a Highlander sent him by a Gordon then in Paris.
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