‘You!’ she exclaimed, ‘You, Mr Thomas Jackson, if that is your name! Loose me from this chair, and I will talk to you.’ Her eyes flashed as she spoke, and the contempt in them added mightily to her beauty. Mr Thomas Jackson, otherwise Jules, erstwhile head waiter at the Grand Babylon, considered himself a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, and the vision of Nella Racksole smote him like an exquisite blow.
‘With pleasure,’ he replied. ‘I had forgotten that to prevent you from falling I had secured you to the chair’; and with a quick movement he unfastened the band. Nella stood up, quivering with fiery annoyance and scorn.
‘Now,’ she said, fronting him, ‘what is the meaning of this?’
‘You fainted,’ he replied imperturbably. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember.’
The man offered her a deck-chair with a characteristic gesture. Nella was obliged to acknowledge, in spite of herself, that the fellow had distinction, an air of breeding. No one would have guessed that for twenty years he had been an hotel waiter. His long, lithe figure, and easy, careless carriage seemed to be the figure and carriage of an aristocrat, and his voice was quiet, restrained, and authoritative.
‘That has nothing to do with my being carried off in this yacht of yours.’
‘It is not my yacht,’ he said, ‘but that is a minor detail. As to the more important matter, forgive me that I remind you that only a few hours ago you were threatening a lady in my house with a revolver.’
‘Then it was your house?’
‘Why not? May I not possess a house?’ He smiled.
‘I must request you to put the yacht about at once, instantly, and take me back.’ She tried to speak firmly.