As Cassandra Tighe scored her point, not without a little air of triumph, Linda tripped gaily down into the cabin.
‘We are to have the very finest weather, Miss Tighe, and all the world means to remain on deck. Only, of course, one wants shawls. What! Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Pausing in her search among the heap of wraps, it would seem that Linda recognised Dinah’s presence with amiable surprise. But Dinah was coldly silent.
‘Surely you, of all people, are not going to become a cabin passenger? My dear creature, I have just escaped the quaintest little adventure in the world! But for Miss Tighe’s advent, I should have eloped, yes, run clean, straight away, with your husband. We were planning it all out, from a commercial standpoint, as we flew, frantically, along the sandhills after Robbie. Were we not, Miss Tighe?’
‘I leave these matters to your own conscience,’ was the dry answer. Possibly, Cassandra recollected that the butterflies were not flying very frantically at the moment when she captured them on the starlit dunes. ‘If you had run away with Mrs. Arbuthnot’s husband, I should have taken good care to run with you. I warned the Doctor of my intentions before I left the Princess.’
‘It was quite too unselfish, Miss Tighe, and, pecuniarily, most àpropos. I possessed five sous in copper (Guernsey currency); Mr. Arbuthnot was worth something under twenty francs. We should have had to leave our watches at the Mont de Piété, for me, alas! no novel experience, the moment we reached Cherbourg. Things have turned out, under Providence, for the best. Only, I think, I think,’ admitted Linda, with arch frankness, ‘the Doctor rather regrets having to retire into insignificance. If I had not come back, Robbie would have remained the hero of the situation.’
Mrs. Thorne ran through all this in her accustomed little tired, inconsequential way of talking, winding up, finally, with a long and earnest yawn. She then danced up to a strip of mirror at the best lighted end of the cabin and settled herself to the contemplation of her own image with interest. She dabbed her cheeks first with rice powder, then with eau-de-cologne, then with powder again, producing these cosmetics without a show of disguise from a tiny gilt case that hung at her waist-belt. She arranged the folds of her cachemire scarf above her sleek head in a certain Gitana mode, which, like all good art, gave an idea of unpremeditation, and became her mightily; she pinned a knot of feathery grass, a memento, doubtless, of the starlit dunes, in her breast.
Easy to predict that Linda Thorne would not be sea-sick to-night! She was warming to the situation, intended to work up her part—everything in human life was a part to Linda Thorne—with spirit.
‘Come up on deck, Mrs. Arbuthnot, will you not? Surely, with your splendid sea-going qualities, you are not going to stop down in this Black Hole of Calcutta?’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot will come up when I do,’ cried Cassandra, who, with an added pair of spectacles on her nose, was pinning out insects under a lamp. ‘Go your ways, Linda Thorne, wise ones if you can, and leave Mrs. Arbuthnot and me to follow ours.’