“H’m, well, you don’t seem very glad. And yet I’ve come a good way to find you, and had a narrow shave of my life, too—as narrow a shave as a man could well have and escape.”
“Yes? How was that?” she asks, hardly able to restrain her eagerness. He sees it and is gratified. The old interest is waking, he thinks; Lilian was always tender-hearted to a fault.
“Why, out in California. Fact is, I was awfully down on my luck and went wandering. Well, I got into one of these street rows and was hit—hit badly. For thirteen weeks I was lying in a hospital, the most awful lazar-house you could imagine, and at the end I crawled out more dead than alive. The best of the joke is that my affectionate relatives thought I was dead, and advertised me accordingly.”
Lilian makes no answer. It was this advertisement that, seen haphazard two years ago, had emancipated her from her fatal bond.
“But didn’t you hear of all this?” he asks.
“You know I have been out of the world for more than four years. When did it happen?”
“Only a year ago,” is his reply. And then she knows that he is lying to her—endeavouring to play upon her sympathies—for she has the number of the newspaper containing the advertisement safely locked up in an inner drawer of her writing-table, and its date is rather more than two years previous. “Those fools Grantham, the lawyers, could tell me nothing about you, though I pestered them with inquiries, till at last I began to suspect they were telling lies just for practice, to keep their hands in. But at last I’ve found you?” And there is a ring of real warmth, to Lilian’s ear, in his voice, which fills her with dismay. Can it be that he has not heard of her position now, that he comes upon her suddenly like this and takes possession of her in his tone, so to say? At all risks she must tell him.
Just then a cheery voice is heard in the passage, humming an old colonial song, and Payne walks into the room. He stops short on seeing the visitor, snatching his pipe from his mouth with one hand, while with the other he welcomes the unexpected guest.
“How d’you do?” says Truscott, in his silkiest manner. “I was hoping to have found Mrs Payne at home this afternoon. Meanwhile, I have been fortunate enough to renew a very old acquaintance with Miss Strange here.”
“So?” replies Payne, looking from one to the other. “Well, I’m glad you’ve found your way up. I saw you this morning, at a distance, when we were seeing those men off to the front. Good all-round lot, weren’t they?”