“Aren’t you just a little transparent, my dear Julian?”
He stared blankly.
I took up a position in front of the fire.
“Disloyalty,” I said tolerantly, “where a woman is concerned, is in the eyes of some people almost a negative virtue.”
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?”
I was sorry for him all the time. In a curiously impersonal way I could realise the depths to which I was sinking in putting this insult upon him. But my better feelings were gagged and bound that night. The one thought uppermost in my mind was that I must tell Julian of Eva, and that by his story of Margaret he had given me an opening for making my confession with the minimum of discomfort to myself.
It was pitiful to see the first shaft of my insinuation slowly sink into him. I could see by the look in his eyes that he had grasped my meaning.
“Jimmy,” he gasped, “you can’t think—are you joking?”
“I am not surprised at your asking that question,” I replied pleasantly. “You know how tolerant I am. But I’m not joking. Not that I blame you, my dear fellow. Margaret is, or used to be, very good-looking.”
“You seem to be in earnest,” he said, in a dazed way.
“My dear fellow,” I said; “I have a certain amount of intuition. You spend an hour here alone with Margaret. She is young, and very pretty. You are placed immediately on terms of intimacy by the fact that you have, in myself, a subject of mutual interest. That breaks the ice. You are at cross-purposes, but your main sympathies are identical. Also, you have a strong objective sympathy for Margaret. I think we may presuppose that this second sympathy is stronger than the first. It pivots on a woman, not on a man. And on a woman who is present, not on a man who is absent. You see my meaning? At any rate, the solid fact remains that she stayed an hour with you, whom she had met for the first time today, and did not feel equal to meeting me, whom she has loved for two years. If you want me to explain myself further, I have no objection to doing so. I mean that you made love to her.”
I watched him narrowly to see how he would take it. The dazed expression deepened on his face.
“You are apparently sane,” he said, very wearily. “You seem to be sober.”
“I am both,” I said.
There was a pause.
“It’s no use for me,” he began, evidently collecting his thoughts with a strong effort, “to say your charge is preposterous. I don’t suppose mere denial would convince you. I can only say, instead, that the charge is too wild to be replied to except in one way, which is this. Employ for a moment your own standard of right and wrong. I know your love story, and you know mine. Miss Eversleigh, my cousin, is to me what Miss Goodwin is to you—true as steel. My loyalty and my friendship for you are the same as your loyalty and your friendship for me.”
“Well?”
“Well, if I have spent an hour with Miss Goodwin, you have spent more than an hour with my cousin. What right have you to suspect me more than I have to suspect you? Judge me by your own standard.”
“I do,” I said, “and I find myself still suspecting you.”
He stared.
“I don’t understand you.”
“Perhaps you will when you have heard the piece of news which I mentioned earlier in our conversation that I had for you.”
“Well?”
“I proposed to your cousin at the Gunton-Cresswells’s dance tonight, and she accepted me.”
The news had a surprising effect on Julian. First he blinked. Then he craned his head forward in the manner of a deaf man listening with difficulty.
Then he left the room without a word.
He had not been gone two minutes when there were three short, sharp taps at my window.
Julian returned? Impossible. Yet who else could have called on me at that hour?
I went to the front door, and opened it.
On the steps stood the Rev. John Hatton. Beside him Sidney Price. And, lurking in the background, Tom Blake of the
Sidney Price’s Narrative
CHAPTER 17
A GHOSTLY GATHERING
Norah Perkins is a peach, and I don’t care who knows it; but, all the same, there’s no need to tell her every little detail of a man’s past life. Not that I’ve been a Don What’s-his-name. Far from it. Costs a bit too much, that game. You simply can’t do it on sixty quid a year, paid monthly, and that’s all there is about it. Not but what I don’t often think of going it a bit when things are slack at the office and my pal in the New Business Department is out for lunch. It’s the loneliness makes you think of going a regular plunger. More than once, when Tommy Milner hasn’t been there to talk to, I tell you I’ve half a mind to take out some girl or other to tea at the “Cabin.” I have, straight.
Yet somehow when the assist. cash. comes round with the wicker tray on the 1st, and gives you the envelope
