'No,' Hugo had said shortly.
He was Hugo, with extraordinary resources at hand, but a quite ordinary
circumstance, such as ten minutes spent in a registry-office, will
sometimes outweigh all the resources in the world when the success of a
scheme hangs in the balance.
What could he do, in London or in Paris, civilized and police-ridden
cities?
Civilization left him but one thing to do--to acknowledge his defeat,
and to mourn the incomparable beauty and the distinguished spirit which
had escaped his passionate grasp. And to this acknowledgment and this
mourning he was reduced, feeling that he was no longer Hugo.
It was perhaps natural, however, that his employes should have been made
to feel that he was more Hugo than ever. For a month he worked as he had
never worked before, and three thousand five hundred people, perspiring
under his glance and under the sun of a London August, knew exactly the
reason why. The intense dramatic and sentimental interest surrounding
Camilla Payne's disappearance from Department 42 was the sole thing
which atoned to the legionaries for the inconvenience of Hugo's mistimed
activity.
Then suddenly he fell limp; he perceived the uselessness of this attempt
to forget in Sloane Street, and he decided to try the banks of a certain
trout-stream on Dartmoor.
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