“Rosbif,” said the waiter genially, manifesting himself suddenly beside them as if he had popped up out of a trap.
Bruce Carmyle attacked his roast beef morosely. Sally who was in the mood when she knew that she would be ashamed of herself later on, but was full of battle at the moment, sat in silence.
“I am sorry,” said Mr. Carmyle ponderously, “if my eyes are fishy. The fact has not been called to my attention before.”
“I suppose you never had any sisters,” said Sally. “They would have told you.”
Mr. Carmyle relapsed into an offended dumbness, which lasted till the waiter had brought the coffee.
“I think,” said Sally, getting up, “I’ll be going now. I don’t seem to want any coffee, and, if I stay on, I may say something rude. I thought I might be able to put in a good word for Mr. Kemp and save him from being massacred, but apparently it’s no use. Goodbye, Mr. Carmyle, and thank you for giving me dinner.”
She made her way down the car, followed by Bruce Carmyle’s indignant, yet fascinated, gaze. Strange emotions were stirring in Mr. Carmyle’s bosom.
IV
Ginger in Dangerous Mood
Some few days later, owing to the fact that the latter, being preoccupied, did not see him first, Bruce Carmyle met his cousin Lancelot in Piccadilly. They had returned by different routes from Roville, and Ginger would have preferred the separation to continue. He was hurrying on with a nod, when Carmyle stopped him.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” he observed.
“Oh, hullo!” said Ginger, without joy.
“I was thinking of calling at your club.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Cigarette?”
Ginger peered at the proffered case with the vague suspicion of the man who has allowed himself to be lured on to the platform and is accepting a card from the conjurer. He felt bewildered. In all the years of their acquaintance he could not recall another such exhibition of geniality on his cousin’s part. He was surprised, indeed, at Mr. Carmyle’s speaking to him at all, for the affaire Scrymgeour remained an unhealed wound, and the Family, Ginger knew, were even now in session upon it.
“Been back in London long?”
“Day or two.”
“I heard quite by accident that you had returned and that you were staying at the club. By the way, thank you for introducing me to Miss Nicholas.”
Ginger started violently.
“What!”
“I was in that compartment, you know, at Roville Station. You threw her right on top of me. We agreed to consider that an introduction. An attractive girl.”
Bruce Carmyle had not entirely made up his mind regarding Sally, but on one point he was clear, that she should not, if he could help it, pass out of his life. Her abrupt departure had left him with that baffled and dissatisfied feeling which, though it has little in common with love at first sight, frequently produces the same effects. She had had, he could not disguise it from himself, the better of their late encounter and he was conscious of a desire to meet her again and show her that there was more in him than she apparently supposed. Bruce Carmyle, in a word, was piqued: and, though he could not quite decide whether he liked or disliked Sally, he was very sure that a future without her would have an element of flatness.
“A very attractive girl. We had a very pleasant talk.”
“I bet you did,” said Ginger enviously.
“By the way, she did not give you her address by any chance?”
“Why?” said Ginger suspiciously. His attitude towards Sally’s address resembled somewhat that of a connoisseur who has acquired a unique work of art. He wanted to keep it to himself and gloat over it.
“Well, I—er—I promised to send her some books she was anxious to read …”
“I shouldn’t think she gets much time for reading.”
“Books which are not published in America.”
“Oh, pretty nearly everything is published in America, what? Bound to be, I mean.”
“Well, these particular books are not,” said Mr. Carmyle shortly. He was finding Ginger’s reserve a little trying, and wished that he had been more inventive.
“Give them to me and I’ll send them to her,” suggested Ginger.
“Good Lord, man!” snapped Mr. Carmyle. “I’m capable of sending a few books to America. Where does she live?”
Ginger revealed the sacred number of the holy street which had the luck to be Sally’s headquarters. He did it because with a persistent devil like his cousin there seemed no way of getting out of it: but he did it grudgingly.
“Thanks.” Bruce Carmyle wrote the information down with a gold pencil in a dapper little morocco-bound notebook. He was the sort of man who always has a pencil, and the backs of old envelopes never enter into his life.
There was a pause. Bruce Carmyle coughed.
“I saw Uncle Donald this morning,” he said.
His manner had lost its geniality. There was no need for it now, and he was a man who objected to waste. He spoke coldly, and in his voice there was a familiar sub-tingle of reproof.
“Yes?” said Ginger moodily. This was the uncle in whose office he had made his debut as a hasher: a worthy man, highly respected in the National Liberal Club, but never a favourite of Ginger’s. There were other minor uncles and a few subsidiary aunts who went to make up the Family, but Uncle Donald was unquestionably the managing director of that body and it was Ginger’s considered opinion that in this capacity he approximated to a human blister.
“He wants you to dine with him tonight at Bleke’s.”
Ginger’s depression deepened. A dinner with Uncle Donald would hardly have been a cheerful function, even in the surroundings of a banquet in the Arabian Nights. There was that about Uncle Donald’s personality which would have cast a sobering influence over the orgies of the Emperor Tiberius at Capri. To dine with him at a morgue like that relic of Old London,
