Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/197

for at that moment a man named Phillips (put down in Pamela’s mental category as “rather a common person” and disregarded in consequence) passed by. Was it possible that he noticed anything and came deliberately to her aid? Somehow Pamela knew he had as he paused, then drew a chair forward and settled himself down to make a third. Sir Herbert went away very soon, and Pamela was left to digest her first lesson as Mr. Phillips droned on about nothing in particular. So it was this rather common person with the decided nasal twang and the unspeakable waistcoats who was really the gentleman, and Sir Herbert who was the “outsider”? She did not speak to Sir Herbert again, but she heard all about Mr. Phillips’s home in Indiana and the girl he hoped to marry next spring, before the trip was over.

She thought about Tony sometimes too. Not often, for he belonged to the past and to the future, and both were painful to her. She had almost hated him that night she saw him last. She did not hate him now, but she did not want ever to see him again. And she did wonder what his reason was for telling her enough to overturn her whole life, and then going out like a candle. Of course she could understand that a man might choose to go away rather than deprive a girl of everything she had been brought up to consider her own, but why—why—why had he blurted out the truth to her like that? Certainly Tony himself would have found it hard to explain satisfactorily that freakish impulse, but the possibility of its real effect on Pamela had never entered his head.

He, meanwhile, was in the engine-room of the Ostara, chug-chugging her oily way down the West Coast of Africa. It was extremely hot, and there was not much time to think; he never thought of Pamela at all. By and by, when he was at leisure again, he would come back to the memory of that queer gay time in London with its odd