“Well?”
“He offered to gamble with me—the winner to have both statues.”
“How like a Chinaman,” Sir Bertram murmured. “It was a good sporting offer, anyway.”
“He got a pack of cards,” Gregory continued. “Well—he won! I was to send this Image back from the steamer. I swear that when I left the warehouse I meant to do so. I had lost fairly, I suppose, and it seemed to me from the first like a debt of honour. I returned on board the ship. Then I looked at the Image and looked at it, and somehow the thing didn’t seem so clear to me, and—damn it, I sent the coolies away and kept it!”
“Anything else?” Sir Bertram asked, after a moment’s pause.
“Yes. You know that this man Endacott’s niece was on board on her way back to England—Madame’s niece, too, I suppose, by-the-by. Lord, what a mess-up!—Dad, we talk about most things pretty nakedly to one another, but we don’t often talk about women.”
“One doesn’t,” his father murmured.
“Listen then,” Gregory went on. “She is young, entirely innocent, entirely adorable. I like her better than any girl I have ever come across in my life. We became great friends. Then we danced at night. You know what that means when you get near the Red Sea, and the Canal, and all the rest of it. Of course you do. We danced every evening, and all the time, down in my stateroom, that Image was leering at me. I began to feel that I was losing control of myself. I tried to keep away from her. She wouldn’t have it. I made an ass of myself once and she forgave me. She thought that she herself had perhaps misunderstood. I was so ashamed of myself that, fortune or no fortune, I tried to throw the damned thing overboard.”
“And what happened?”
“It pitched in an outslung boat and was brought back to me,” Gregory explained grimly. “Afterwards—well, I offended again.”