Diana of Kara-Kara E-Book

Edgar Wallace

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

“She is an orphan,” said Mr. Collings emotionally.
Orphans were Mr. Collings’ weakness.
In ordinary intercourse as between lawyer and client, he was a stern, reserved man with a cold passion for compromise. Litigants entered his office charged with bubbling joy that their enemies had delivered themselves into their hands; they came talking five figure damages and the stark ruin of men and corporations who and which had offended them. They slunk out again into the glare of an Australian sun, their cases demolished, their spirits broken, their futures clouded. Mr. Collings did not believe in litigation. He believed that things could be arranged.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

DIANA OF KARA-KARA

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

DIANA OF KARA-KARA

BY EDGAR WALLACEAuthor of “The Green Archer,” “The Clue of the New Pin,” etc.Edition 1924,

 © 2021 Librorium Editions

 ISBN : 9782383830207

CHAPTER I

“She is an orphan,” said Mr. Collings emotionally.

Orphans were Mr. Collings’ weakness.

In ordinary intercourse as between lawyer and client, he was a stern, reserved man with a cold passion for compromise. Litigants entered his office charged with bubbling joy that their enemies had delivered themselves into their hands; they came talking five figure damages and the stark ruin of men and corporations who and which had offended them. They slunk out again into the glare of an Australian sun, their cases demolished, their spirits broken, their futures clouded. Mr. Collings did not believe in litigation. He believed that things could be arranged.

If it was possible for a murdered man to walk into Mr. Collings’ office and say: “I’ve got an excellent case against Binks: he has just shot me dead. Do you think I can get damages?” Mr. Collings would reply: “I very much doubt it. There is a great deal to be said for Binks. And aren’t you in rather an awkward position yourself? You are carrying about a bullet which undoubtedly is the property of Binks. You never know what point of view a jury will take. You had better let me try to settle this.”

But in the matter of orphans Mr. Collings was slightly unbalanced. He was strictly brought up by parents who compelled him to read books on Sunday that were entirely devoted to orphans and good organ-grinders and little girls who quoted extensively from precious books and died surrounded by weeping negroes. In such literature the villains of the piece were young scoundrels who surreptitiously threw away their crusts and only ate the crumbly part of bread; desperadoes who kicked dogs and threw large flies into spiders’ webs and watched the spider at his fell work with glee.

“She is an orphan,” said Mr. Collings again, and blew his nose loudly.

“She has been an orphan for ten years,” said Mr. William Cathcart cynically.

Mr. Collings was stout, bald, given to afternoon naps; Mr. Cathcart was thin, narrow-faced, not so bald, and never slept at all, so far as anybody knew. He hated orphans. They stood for questions of cestui que use, problems of cy-pres, perplexities of donatio mortis causa and the Guardianship of Infants Act. He never saw an orphan without his hand going instinctively to his hip pocket.

“And the most irregular orphan I have ever met,” continued Mr. William Cathcart remorselessly. “An infant in law with a bank balance of a hundred thousand! I refuse to drop a tear—positively!”

Mr. Collings wiped his eyes.

“She is an orphan,” he insisted. “Mrs. Tetherby gave her the money during her lifetime: there is nothing irregular in that. If I gave an—an orphan”—he swallowed hard—“a penny, a pound—a thousand—is that a breach of the law, an impropriety, even though it is practised de die in diem?”

Mr. Cathcart considered.

“You might in certain circumstances be acting de sont tort,” he said.

Mr. Collings pondered this; found the term almost inapplicable, but not so much so that he could be offensive in a gentlemanly way. Wisely he returned to lamb.

“Mrs. Tetherby was inert. Stout women are often inert——”

“Lazy,” suggested the dyspeptic Cathcart.

“She was fond of Diana. Few aunts are fond of nieces. Her will proves that. She left everything——”

“There was nothing to leave,” interrupted Mr. William Cathcart with sour satisfaction. How that man hated orphans! “There was nothing to leave because in her lifetime she gave Diana full control of her money.”

“She was inert,” murmured Mr. Collings. “She loved this orphan child——”

“If there was one woman in the world who ought never to have been allowed——”

“Never ought have been,” corrected Mr. Collings gently.

“—to have charge of a girl of Diana Ford’s temperament, it is or was Mrs. Tetherby. A child of sixteen who has a raging love affair with a student——”

“A theological student,” insisted Mr. Collings. “Don’t forget that. A young woman may well feel that she could give her heart to a theological student when a medical student would have revolted all that was most sensitive in her nature.”

“A theological student makes it worse.”

“At least Mrs. Tetherby consulted us on that matter.” Mr. Collings was a shade reproachful. “Inert or energetic, she consulted us.”

“She consulted us to discover whether she would be liable to trial for murder if she waylaid and shot Mr. Dempsi. She said that she had set a dog on to him, but he was incapable of taking a hint. Those were her words.”

“Dempsi is dead,” said Mr. Collings in a hushed voice. “I spoke to Diana on the subject only eight months ago—when her dear aunt died. I asked her if the wound had left a scar. She said she scarcely remembered a scratch, and that she often amused herself in the evenings by trying to draw him from memory.”

“A heartless little devil,” said Mr. Cathcart.

“A child—youth has no memory, not even for its stomach aches,” said Mr. Collings oracularly.

“Did you discuss those too?” sneered his partner.

Mr. Collings raised his eyebrows. Such a man as he is hopeless in the face of sheer vulgarity.

“An orphan....” he began.

The clerk at the door spoke in the strained way of managing clerks.

“Miss Diana Ford, sir,” he said.

The legal house of Collings & Cathcart exchanged glances.

“Show the young lady in.” The door closed. “Be gentle with her, William.”

Mr. Cathcart writhed.

“Will she be gentle with me?” he asked bitterly. “Will you guarantee that she will be reasonably polite to me—and back your guarantee with real money?”

There came through the door a peach tree, blossoming in the spring of the year; summer dawn on riverside meadows with the dew winking from a thousand gossamers. The froth of hawthorn in an English country lane; a crystal brook whispering between slim larches. Miss Diana Ford.

During the war Mr. Cathcart had held a commission in the Army Service Corps (Home Service) and had acquired the inventory habit. He saw:

Girl:

Slim, medium size.

One.

Eyes:

Grey-blue; large, more or less innocent.

Two.

Mouth:

Red, Bow-shaped, largish.

One.

Nose:

Straight, in perfect shape.

One.

Hair:

Slightly golden, bobbed.

One complete head.

Diana was as unrecognisable from the inventory as the average man from the description on his passport. She had the atmosphere of spring and dawn. Her colouring belonged to such season and time, having a pink of its own and a whiteness which looked pink when compared with white. She moved with such supple grace that Mr. Cathcart suspected an entire absence of corsets—he was a married man.

She came impulsively to Mr. Collings and kissed him. Mr. William Cathcart closed his eyes, so did not meet the smirk of satisfaction which his partner loosened for his benefit.

“Good morning, Uncle. Good morning, Uncle Cathcart.”

“’Mornin’,” said Mr. Cathcart, hostile to the last.

“’Mornin’!” she boomed in imitation. “And I’ve come feeling awfully nice toward you! I called you ‘Uncle’!”

“I heard you,” glowered the newly elected relative. “It would be much better, Miss Ford, if we proceeded on business lines——”

“You can proceed on tram lines if that pleases you,” she sighed, taking off her hat and tossing it on to the nearest deed-box. “Oh, Uncle Collings, I’m sick!”

Mr. Cathcart half rose in his alarm.

“Sick of Australia, sick of the station, sick of the people, sick of everything. I’m going home.”

“Home!” gasped Mr. Collings. “But, my dear little Diana. If by ‘home’ you mean England and not—er——”

“Heaven,” suggested Mr. Cathcart.

“I mean England, of course I mean England. I am going to stay with my cousin, Gordon Selsbury.”

Mr. Collings scratched his nose.

“An elderly person, of course?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged her indifference.

“Married, er——?”

“I suppose so. If he’s nice. All the nice men are married—present company excepted.”

Mr. Collings was a bachelor and could afford to laugh very heartily. Mr. Cathcart, on the other hand, was married and was not even amused.

“You have cabled and written, of course: there is no objection to your going to—er—Mr. Selsbury’s?”

“None whatever.” She was overridingly brisk. “He will be delighted to have me.”

“Twenty!” said Mr. Cathcart and shook his head. “An infant in law! I really think we must know more about Mr. Selsbury and his condition before—eh, Collings?”

Mr. Collings looked appealingly at the girl; she had never seemed more or looked less orphaned than at that moment.

“It would be wise, perhaps—?” he no more than suggested.

When Diana smiled her eyes wrinkled up and you saw both rows of her small white teeth.

“I have taken my cabin: a lovely one. With a bathroom and sitting-room. The walls are panelled in blue brocade silk and there is a cute little brass bedstead in the middle—so that you can fall out either side.”

Mr. William Cathcart felt it was the moment to bring down his foot.

“I am afraid I cannot consent to your going,” he said quietly.

“Why?” Up went her chin.

“Yes, why?” demanded Mr. Collings. He was anxious to know.

“Because,” said Mr. Cathcart, “because, my dear young lady, you are an infant in the eyes of the wise old law of this country; because Mr. Collings and I stand in loco parentis to you. Now I am old enough to be your father——”

“And grandfather,” she said calmly. “But does that matter? There was a lad of sixty trying to find opportunities for squeezing my hand all the way down in the train from Bendigo. Age means nothing if your heart is young.”

“Exactly!” said Mr. Collings, whose heart was very young.

“The long and the short of it is that you can’t go,” said Mr. William Cathcart defiantly. “I do not wish to apply for an order of the court——”

“One moment, little friend of the poor,” said Diana. She threw several priceless law books and a pile of affidavits from a chair and sat down. “A few moments ago—correct me if I am wrong: I seldom am—you produced your hoary Mr. Loco Parentis to crush me to the earth. Meet Colonel Locus Standi!”

“Eh?” said William, dithered.

“My knowledge of legal formula is slight,” said Diana gravely. “I have lived a pure and a sheltered life amidst the rolling grass lands of Kara-Kara, but ignorant orphan though I am....”

Mr. Collings sighed.

“...I understand that before a lawyer applies to the courts he must have a client. For no lawyer, except perhaps a lawyer who has been crossed in love and is not quite sane, goes to law without a client.”

Mr. William Cathcart shrugged his shoulders.

“You must make your own bed,” he said.

“The court can’t even make me do that,” she replied.

Mr. Cathcart saw her walking across to him and took up his pen hastily.

“Uncle Cathcart,” she said in a low voice, “I did so hope and pray that we should part friends! Every night when I kneel by my bed and say ‘Please, God, give Uncle Cathcart a sense of humour and make him a nice man,’ I have expected the miracle to happen.”

Uncle Cathcart wriggled.

“Have your own way,” he said loudly. “I can’t put an old head on young shoulders. Those who live longest will see most.”

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she added gently. “You forgot that one.”

At luncheon, Mr. Collings tapped the ash of his cigar into the coffee saucer.

“What is this fellow like—this Selsbury?”

“He’s wonderful!” she said dreamily. “He rowed six in the University eight—I’m simply crazy about him.”

The startled Mr. Collings gazed at her in fascinated horror.

“Is he crazy about you?” he gasped.

Diana smiled. She was adjusting her nose with the aid of a mirror concealed in the flap of her handbag.

“He will be,” she said softly.

CHAPTER II

Neither by nature crazy, nor by inclination eccentric, Mr. Gordon Selsbury had at moments serious but comfortable doubts as to whether he was not a little abnormal; whether he was not, in fine, one of those rare and gifted mortals to whom was given Vision beyond the ordinary. His environment was the commonplace City of London; his occupation a shrieking incongruity for a spiritual man—he was an insurance broker. And a prosperous insurance broker.

Sometimes he sat before the silver fire grate of his sitting-room, amazed at the contradictory evidence of his own genius. Here (said he, thinking impartially) was a man with a Conscious Soul, beside whom other men were clods, vegetables, animals of the field, slaves to their material demands. Lifted above the world and its peculiarly grimy interests, he was a man whose spiritual head rose above fog and was one with the snow-capped mountains and the blue skies. And yet—here was the truly astonishing thing—he could grapple most practically with these materialists and could tear from the clenched and frenzied paws large quantities of soiled and greasy money....

“No, Trenter, I shall be out to-morrow afternoon. Will you please tell Mr. Robert that I will see him at my office. Thank you, Trenter.”

Trenter inclined his head respectfully and went back to the telephone.

“No, sir, Mr. Selsbury will not be at home to-morrow.”

Bobbie Selsbury was annoyed.

“Will you tell him that he promised to play in a foursome with me, tell him—ask him to come to the telephone.”

Gordon got up from his tapestried armchair with an expressionless face. Before the servants he revealed nothing in the least degree emotive.

“Yes, yes, I know!” wearily. “But I had a prior engagement. You must get somebody else. Old Mendlesohn ... what’s the matter with him? Rubbish, my dear fellow.... At any rate, you must get somebody—I’m tremendously busy to-morrow.... I don’t feel like discussing my business on the telephone. Good-bye.”

He paced his dignified way to his den. Gordon Selsbury once rowed six in the Varsity boat—there were crossed oars above his fireplace, though he thought the display in bad taste. He had once been a fresher whose chief joy in life had been to steal policemen’s helmets and ride a bicycle down forbidden pathways, and to sprint from proctors. It seemed difficult to believe. He was tall and good-looking in the Apollo Belvedere manner. Fair, with a forehead which was large and thoughtful, he baffled instant analysis by carrying through life two inches of sidewhisker on either cheek. Men seeing him first thought he wrote music or played a ’cello. Women on introduction guessed him as a dancer of amazing agility, or possibly a film artist.

“Trenter....”

Trenter waited, his head attentively thrust forward, a simulation of intense interest on his sharp features. He continued to wait, even as Gordon continued to frown at the fireplace.

“Trenter....”

“Yes, sir?”

Slowly Mr. Selsbury turned his head until his eyes met Trenter’s.

“I saw you kissing the parlourmaid this morning. You are a married man, I believe?”

Trenter blinked apprehensively. He was indeed married.

“I do not wish that sort of thing to happen again,” said Gordon, mildly scandalised. “You are a married man with responsibilities which cannot be ignored or set on one side. Eleanor, as I understand her name to be, is a young girl, possibly inflammable, certainly impressionable. To cloud a young girl’s life by awakening in her heart a passion which you cannot return is most reprehensible. Even I have been rocked by the current which the stone you cast has set into motion. My shaving water was late this morning. This must not occur again.”

“No, sir,” said Trenter.

News comes instantly to the servants’ hall in any event. Now, telepathy lagged behind Trenter’s spoken word.

Eleanor, tall, svelte, pallid of face, black eyebrows and eyes that flashed, interrupted the operation of a lip-stick to listen. She was tremulously indignant.

“Because he’s a St. Andrew, does he think that we haven’t any human feelings? The poor cold-blooded fish! I’ll let him know that I won’t be talked about and my name took away—taken away, I mean—by a prying, sneaking, rubber-soled spy. He is too!”

“Who’s this St. Andrew?” Trenter was suspicious of all saints, being by marriage a Primitive Baptist.

“He’s the man that women tempted and he wouldn’t,” said Eleanor, prepared to drop the illustration. But Trenter was of another mind.

“Who’s been tempting him?” he asked, darkling eyed.

“Nobody: not if it’s me you mean. I’d like to see him put his arm round my waist! He’d never forget it!”

“He wouldn’t forget himself anyway,” said Trenter, relieved.

She tossed her head sceptically.

“Oh, I don’t know!” she said, and nodded to a warm, large woman in the gingham and apron of her profession. “Ask cook!”

Trenter was dazed.

“Good God!—not you, cook?” he asked in a whisper.

Happily Mrs. Magglesark was not a quick thinker.

“Yes; I saw him too,” she said, and Eleanor, in terror that the telling of the story should go elsewhere, trod on the opening of the cook’s narrative.

“Me and cook—that is to say cook and I—were on top of a ’bus last Sunday——”

“In Knightsbridge.” Thus the cook claimed her equal share of the copyright.

“We were laughing and talking when cook said ‘Look, Nelly—there’s the boss.’”

“I said ‘If that isn’t his nibs!’” amended Mrs. Magglesark.

“And there he was!” said Eleanor. “With a girl, very tall and dressed in black, and he was holding her hand!”

“In the street?” incredulously.

“In the car: from the top of a ’bus you can look down into cars, if they’re open. Many a sight I’ve seen!”

“Was she pretty?” asked Trenter, man-like.

Eleanor’s lips pursed.

“Well, I suppose some people would call her pretty. Did you think she was pretty, cook?”

Mrs. Magglesark, having reached the age when she regarded all young people as passable, thought she was pretty.

“Holding her hand!” Trenter was very thoughtful. “It wasn’t Mrs. van Oynne?”

“Who is she?”

“She’s been here twice to tea. An American lady, rather well-dressed. Heloise! That’s her name. And a good-looker. She usually wears black and paradise feathers.”

“She wore paradise feathers!” said cook and Eleanor together.

Trenter nodded.

“That’s her,” he said, “but there’s nothing in it. She’s a highbrow. Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn’t make head or tail of.”

Eleanor was impressed.

“Funny for him to be discussing eggs,” she said.

It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of speech.

Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel, and they were comparatively alone.

“There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you, Heloise,” he said softly. “A month! It almost seems incredible! If our theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation ...?”

Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though the words were spoken: “How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!”

On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought.

“What is so fine about friendship,” Gordon was going on, “is that we have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism.”

“How’s that?”

Her head was bent forward eagerly, enquiringly. Trenter had the same trick, only he looked pained.

“I mean”—Gordon Selsbury flicked a crumb of cake daintily from his knee—“we have never tarnished the bright surface of our friendship with that weakness which is so glibly styled ‘love.’”

“Oh!” Heloise van Oynne sat back in her basket chair. “That’s so,” she said, and if there was a sense of immense satisfaction in her tone, even one attuned to her spiritual wavelength would not have observed the circumstance.

“The perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding, the dovetailing of mind into mind, the oneness of a mutual soul—these transcend all sentient impressions, whatever be the label they bear.”

She smiled slowly and with infinite sweetness and comradeship. Heloise invariably smiled at Gordon that way when she wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. Though, as to souls——

“The soul is certainly the finest thing we have around,” she said, in deep thought. “That’s where we’ve got most people skinned—I should say, at a disadvantage, you and I, Gordon. One doesn’t like to bare one’s heart; one shrinks instinctively even from self-revelation.”

She sighed as one who had got through an exercise of considerable difficulty. Then, observing by certain signs that he had only, so to speak, removed the lid of his introspections and that the real contents of his mind would shortly spill, to be gathered up and replaced by her none too sure hands, she interjected hastily:

“You were telling me, Gordon, about a cousin of yours in Australia—she must certainly be interesting, and I’m just mad to hear about your relations. I like you, Gordon—a lot. There’s nothing about you that doesn’t fascinate me.”

She laid a gloved hand on his knee. No other woman could lay a hand, gloved or ungloved, on Gordon Selsbury’s knee without his calling for the police. But Heloise ... he laid his hand gently on hers.

“Diana? Well, really, I know nothing about her except that she had that tremendous affair with a fellow called Dempsi. I told you that. She’s very well off, I believe. I’ve taken a little notice of her—sent her a few books and a word or two of advice. I often think that a man’s advice is ever so much more acceptable to a young girl than a woman’s. When were we talking about her? Oh, of course, I remember! It was when we had that tremendous talk on the growth of the Ego....”

“Is she fair or dark?” Heloise nimbly blocked the road to metaphysics.

“I really don’t know. I had a letter from my aunt—her aunt also—just before the poor creature died. She said that Diana had forgotten Dempsi and wondered where she could get his photograph—the man is dead. Has it ever occurred to you, Heloise, how absurd are such terms as life and de——”

“Diana!” mused Heloise, aloud. “Poor little Australian girl. I should like to meet her, Gordon.”

Gordon shook his head, smiling gently.

“I cannot imagine anything less likely,” he said, “than your meeting her.”

CHAPTER III

Cheynel Gardens is one of those very select thoroughfares that no cab-driver has ever found without the assistance of a local guide. Taximen have “heard of it,” dimly remember having dropped a fare there at some time or other; but where it is, only the police and the postmen know. Often people who live in Cheynel Gardens have only the haziest idea whether they are in Mayfair or Marylebone.

Gordon occupied a corner house that had a garden, probably the garden after which the thoroughfare was named, for there was no other. If a garden can be so called that consists of a twelve by ten paved courtyard occupied by two large bushes in tubs.

It was the last house on the left as you turned in from Brook Street, a handsome, sober pile of red brick and yellow sandstone, with a big study to which stained-glass windows gave the appearance of a well-furnished chapel.

His study was indeed a holy place, for none entered without invitation. It had two doors, one of thick oak, one of deadening baize, so that no sound might disturb Gordon’s close and careful scrutiny of The Economist, which, with the Insurance Review, formed his light reading. By day he perused The Times, by night he read heavy studies in sociology, or, if he were tired, Zur Genealogie der Moral—Nietzsche being one of his favourite authors.

He descended from the cab that brought him home, gave the driver a ten per cent. tip worked out to the nearest penny, and erring on his own side, and walked slowly up the steps. The door opened instantly. It was part of the daily ritual. Trenter took his hat, his walking-stick and his gloves, and Gordon said:

“No letters?”

If Trenter had said no, the ritual would have been interrupted.

“Yes, sir, and——”

No need to say more. Gordon was staring at four immense trunks that almost completely covered the floor space of the hall. Three of them were conspicuously labelled “Not wanted on voyage.” The fourth had a big red “Cabin” pasted on its side.

“What—on—earth—are—these?” asked Gordon breathlessly.

“The young lady arrived this afternoon, sir.” Trenter was all a-twitter.

“The young lady arrived—which young lady, may I ask?”

“Miss Ford, sir.”

Gordon’s forehead wrinkled. He had heard the name in some connection. Ford ... Ford? It was familiar.

“No, sir—Miss Diana Ford from Australia.”

The cousin! Mr. Selsbury inclined his head graciously. The instincts of hospitality were not entirely atrophied, and the Selsburys were a race of courtly men.

“Will you tell Miss Ford I am returned and will be glad to see her in The Study?”

Trenter’s face twitched.

“She’s in The Study, sir,” he almost pleaded. “I told her that nobody ever went when you were away and that I kept it locked.”

Gordon was taken aback. It is disconcerting to a host to find his hospitality anticipated and taken as a right.

“Indeed!” he said, and smiled. “Miss Ford couldn’t be expected to understand our ways, Trenter. I will see her.”

He knocked at the door and a voice bade him enter.

“I am delighted to meet you, Cousin Diana,” he said, and looked round to discover how she might be met.

Then from his favourite chair a white hand appeared.

“Come in, Gordon.... I’m sure it’s Gordon.”

She jumped up and round to face him. She had taken off her shoes for greater comfort, and in her silk-stockinged feet looked very small. He thought she was pretty, just as he would have thought that a kitten was pretty. How very amusing.

“Well, young lady,” he said with paternal good-humour, “so here you are! I never expected to see you. Have you had a good voyage——?”

“Are you married?” She asked the question rather tensely.

“No, I’m not married. I’m a confirmed old bachelor.”

“Ah!” She sighed happily. “I was awfully scared of that complication—you haven’t kissed me.”

Gordon was not aware that he had not kissed her, any more than he was aware that he had not hit her on the head with the book he was carrying. The Selsburys were a courtly race. He stooped and struck her gently with his lips.

“Sit down, my dear—you will have tea, of course? I am truly sorry that I kept you waiting. Where are you staying?”

She flashed one look at him.

“Here,” she said.

For a second he could not comprehend.

“I mean, what hotel—where are you—er—sleeping to-night?”

“Here,” said Diana.

In moments of crisis Gordon never lost his head. He once stood on the deck of a sinking cross-Channel steamer discussing the atomic theory with a Cambridge don. He had twice heard burglars in the house, and had often been called upon without notice at public meetings to propose the health of the chairman.

“You mean that you are coming to stay with me—for a little while? I would be delighted, but unfortunately this is a bachelor establishment. There are no women in the house except the domestic staff.”

He spoke kindly; his argument was logical, his attitude correct in every detail.

“You want a woman about the house; it was very nearly time I came,” she said, as unflurried as Gordon himself.

He stifled his sigh. The position was embarrassing—other men would have been thrown off their feet and either lost their tempers or behaved in some way hurtfully.

“I shall be delighted to have you here—for a few days,” he smiled. “So run along and telephone to your chaperone and ask her to bring her trunks here——”

Diana pulled on her shoes, unconcerned.

“I’ve been admiring your oars,” she said. “You rowed six, didn’t you—and won! How splendid!”

“Yes, yes—er—yes.” Gordon was not proud of his bygone athleticism. “Or shall I telephone?”

“To whom?” innocently.

“To your chaperone ... the lady with whom you are travelling....”

“Don’t be silly.”

He stiffened; went limp again: turned a shade paler.

“I travelled alone—as much alone as one can be with a hundred and fifty saloon passengers who played deck games and enjoyed them. An intellectual woman can have no possible community of interest with people who enthuse over bucket quoits.”

A chair was within reach of his hand and he sat down. Men like Gordon Selsbury seldom lose grip of a situation, however awkward it may be. The sheer weight of their wisdom and their personality has a tendency to roll flat obstacles of the most tremendous nature.

“Now I’m going to be a father and an uncle and a wise old cousin to you,” he said, good nature rigidly and obstinately imprinted in his smile. “You’re a young girl and somebody has got to tell you that you cannot stay alone—er—as the guest of a bachelor.”

She stood, her hands behind her, not the ghost of amusement in her face, unmoved and immovable.

“And I’ve got to tell you, Gordon Selsbury, that I not only can, but I’m going to stay here! I am not responsible for your being a bachelor. You ought to be married. It is unnatural to live in a big house like this by yourself. I have come to stay and, possibly, keep house for you. You must let me have a list of the dishes you like for breakfast. I like grape fruit and hominy with a small crisp slice of bacon. At the same time, Gordon, I am not averse to devilled kidneys à la chef—do you like waffles? I’m crazy about them! We had a Japanese cook who made them to perfection. Another wonderful breakfast dish is tomatoes chiffre....”

“Diana,” he said gravely, “you are distressing me. Of course you can’t possibly stay here! My dear child, I have to consider your good name; in after years you will realise what a dreadful thing you have proposed. Now, my dear, I’m going to ’phone Laridge’s Hotel and ask them to reserve a nice room for you.”

He half rose; her hands dropped to his shoulders and she pushed him down. It was surprising how strong she was.