‘I had just sent round to you,’ said the smiling little lady, ‘at your hotel.’ She transferred the parasol to her left hand, and held out the right in an almost effusive greeting. ‘I suppose you have not been back yet?’
‘No,’ Paul answered. ‘I have been walking and had lost myself, until I recognised the garden through the open door yonder. Then I made sure of myself again, and thought I might secure a short-cut home.’
‘How fortunate!’ said Gertrude, smiling; ‘and how curious, too!’ she added. ‘At the very moment at which I caught sight of you your name was in my mind. Are you a believer in the Aura, Colonel Brunton—the something which envelops personality and diffuses itself in such a manner that you recognise a friend’s presence before you are made aware of it by sight or hearing? Don’t you recognise the reality of those things? But, oh, I forgot! You gentlemen are, I am afraid, strangers to each other. This is Colonel Brunton, our great traveller in the Himalayas and Thibet, and this is Mr. Paul Armstrong, the author of I dare not say how many charming books and comedies—Mr. Darco’s collaborateur.’
‘Whose work,’ said Colonel Brunton in a voice typically American, but profoundly deep, ‘I have, bafore my trip to Asia, seen performed with a splendid eclaw both in London and New York. I am proud to meet you, Mr. Armstrong.’
He was a rugged man, brown as a sun-burned brick, with a cascading moustache of silver, jet-black eyebrows, and eyes which danced defiance at his gray hairs and wrinkles. Paul could do no less than accept the hearty hand he offered, and Gertrude set herself to soothe him.
‘You know,’ she said, laying her finger-tips upon his arm, ‘you are a very inattentive cavalier, Mr. Armstrong. Poor Mrs. Diedrich was taken ill so suddenly and alarmingly that I had time to do no more than just to scribble that little hasty note to you. You might at least have paused to make inquiry.’
‘That would never have done,’ said Paul ‘One does not inquire into a lady’s decision at any moment.’
He spoke with a capital assumption of gaiety, but to the keen instinct of that experienced trifler with hearts it was an assumption only, and Gertrude turned the question with the easy skill of a woman of the world.
‘Those geological researches now,’ she said, with a charming air of mocking schoolgirl ignorance about such matters. ‘Do you really mean to tell me that right away in the Himalayas you found the same little protozoic blot in the same limestone that you find in our own Andes? Has that little creature really built the mountains of the world? Why, it is the story of the Coral Islands over again; but on what an enormous scale, ‘Dear me, what creatures of a day we are!’
Colonel Brunton, who, as it appeared, was a member of many learned societies, and a most indefatigable besieger of the world’s inaccessible places, turned out to be a man of so much simplicity, sincerity, and charm, and Gertrude drew him to his best so skilfully, that it was not easy to be sulky for a long time together in his society. It was Paul’s cue to disguise himself as far as possible, and this delightful American helped him greatly. He could barely think of the man as a rival; he was so very upright, downright complimentary.