Note 2. If, on the contrary, I decide, on mature deliberation, that I could not have acted otherwise, I will keep this always in the secret drawer of my writing-desk, where I can take it out and look at it at least once every year until I am an old woman-ever so much older than Aunt Mary.
When Jimmy Payne suddenly hurled himself at me out of a cab (just as Aunt Mary and I and a donkey were trailing disconsolately down from Mola) and exploded into fireworks calculated to blow my poor Lightning Conductor into fragments, I threw cold water on his Roman candles and rockets.
All the same, though, I felt as if I had been dipped first into boiling hot, then freezing cold water myself. I couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't believe any of Jimmy's sensational accusations of Brown, and I defended him whenever Jimmy would let me get in a word edgewise. But when he told me that Dad had come half across the world from New York to Sicily on the strength of his statements, I was wild-partly with anger and partly with anxiety to see my dear old Angel "immediately if not sooner."
I don't remember a word Jimmy said to me, driving down to Sir Edward Haines', where Dad had gone expecting to find me. I've just a hazy recollection of being hurried through a beautiful garden; I knew that poor Lady Brighthelmston (piteously worried about her son) and a rather common girl and her father, whom we'd stumbled across in Blois, were with us. Their cab had come behind ours. I saw Dad in the distance, talking to Brown, who looked less like a hired chauffeur than ever, and then-then came the thunderbolt.
It was almost as difficult to believe at first that he had tricked me by pretending to be Brown, when he was really Mr. Winston, as it would have been to believe Jimmy Payne's penny-dreadful stories. But you can't go on doubting when a virtuous old lady claims a man as her own son. I had to accept the fact that he was Jack Winston.
For an instant I felt as if it were a play, and I were someone in the audience, looking on. It didn't seem real, or to have anything to do with me. Then I caught his eyes. They were saying, "Do forgive me"; and with that I realized how much there was to forgive. He had made me behave like a perfect little fool, giving him good advice and tips-actually tips!-telling him (or very nearly) that he was "quite like a gentleman," and hundreds of other outrageous things which all rushed into my mind, as they say your whole past life does when you are drowning.
I gave him a glance-quite a short one, because I could hardly look him in the face, thinking of those tips and other things.
Then I turned away, and began talking to Dad; but very likely I talked great nonsense, for I hadn't the least idea what I was saying, except that I kept exclaiming the same five words over and over, like a phonograph doll: "I am glad to see you! I am glad to see you!"
Perhaps I had presence of mind enough to invite the dear thing to take a stroll with me, for the sake of escaping from Brown; for, anyway, I woke up from a sort of dream, to find myself walking into a summer-house alone with Dad.
"Don't you think," he was saying, "that you treated Mr. Winston rather rudely?"