"It depends. Mind that when he's about you don't know me."
He watched her as she went up the hall. Her bright smile came off very easily. She looked a little tired and hunted.
That night he could come to no satisfactory explanation. He could only decide to do exactly as he had been told, and await events. In the meantime the girl's face haunted him, and always as it had been when she did not know that he could see her—always with that tired and hunted look. What had been her story? What was inside her heart and mind? What cards was she playing? Why had she spoken to him? The questions were endless. His interest in her, strangely powerful, kept him for long awake.
III
The little farce was played out with great success next morning. Lake told a beautiful story, and did it the better because Irene Jocelyn, breakfasting alone at the next table, was listening intently. After smoking the hasheesh he had heard the Sphinx talking. Then a black and limitless ocean had broken over it, and out of the ocean a strange white woman had crept and cut herself with a gold-handled knife.
"Good," said the doctor, with dry triumph. "And the more interesting because you have never had any hasheesh at all."
"No?" asked Lake. "I thought that would be it." He tossed the envelope across to the doctor. "You'll find your tobacco inside—how do you give it that green colour? I think the score is with me."
The doctor was angry, the more so because Brookes was undisguisedly amused at the failure. But he made one shrewd guess. "If I had mentioned the thing to a solitary soul I should have been certain that it had been given away to you. As it is, I can't see how you came to think of it for yourself. It's quite unlike you."
IV
For the next two days Irene Jocelyn successfully avoided young Lake, and thereby drove him to the verge of madness. It even occurred to him to play a bold stroke and ask the doctor to introduce him. But he had the reasonable conviction that that introduction would do him more harm than good with this strange girl. He grew to hate Henson-Blake; it was evident that while he was there Irene would not speak. He invented excuses to get him out of the way.