foiled.

He was at our table in a stride. "I am sorry," he sneered witheringly,
"to break up your pleasant party, but--"

"You don't; you complete it," I assured him. "Mr. Soames and I want to
have a little talk with you. Won't you sit? Mr. Soames got nothing,
frankly nothing, by his journey this afternoon. We don't wish to say
that the whole thing was a swindle, a common swindle. On the contrary,
we believe you meant well. But of course the bargain, such as it was,
is off."

The devil gave no verbal answer. He merely looked at Soames and
pointed with rigid forefinger to the door. Soames was wretchedly
rising from his chair when, with a desperate, quick gesture, I swept
together two dinner-knives that were on the table, and laid their
blades across each other. The devil stepped sharp back against the
table behind him, averting his face and shuddering.

"You are not superstitious!" he hissed.

"Not at all," I smiled.

"Soames," he said as to an underling, but without turning his face,
"put those knives straight!"

With an inhibitive gesture to my friend, "Mr. Soames," I said
emphatically to the devil, "is a Catholic diabolist"; but my poor
friend did the devil's bidding, not mine; and now, with his master's
eyes again fixed on him, he arose, he shuffled past me. I tried to
speak. It was he that spoke. "Try," was the prayer he threw back at
me as the devil pushed him roughly out through the door--"TRY to make
them know that I did exist!"

In another instant I, too, was through that door. I stood staring all
ways, up the street, across it, down it. There was moonlight and
lamplight, but there was not Soames nor that other.

Dazed, I stood there. Dazed, I turned back at length into the little
room, and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon
and for Soames's; I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtieme again.
Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for
years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same
night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some
such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place
where he has lost something. "Round and round the shutter'd
Square"--that line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the
whole stanza, ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically
different from the happy scene imagined by him was the poet's actual
experience of that prince i