“Oh, I’m sending her home.”
Cartwright’s voice was brisk and he spoke in the manner of a man referring to a topic too unimportant to be discussed.
“And after?” pursued Maxell, and the other shrugged his shoulders.
“I have given her a letter of introduction to a friend of mine,” he said carelessly. “I have one or two theatrical interests in town.”
Maxell said nothing, and could have dismissed the matter as lightly as his companion, for the girl’s future scarcely interested him.
She had been but a figure on the stage; her personality, her very appearance, left no definite impression. But if he was not interested in the girl, he was interested in Cartwright’s private mind. Here was a man of whom he could not know too much. And somehow he felt that he had hardly cracked the surface of Cartwright’s character though he had known him for years, and though they were working together to a common end.
The way of a man with a maid is wonderful, but it is also instructive to the cold-blooded onlooker, who discovers in that way a kind of creature he has never met before; a new man, so entirely different from the familiar being he had met in club or drawing-room as to be almost unrecognisable. And he wanted to know just this side of Cartwright, because it was the side on which he had scarcely any information.
“I suppose you won’t see her again?” he said, playing with his knife and looking abstractedly out of the window.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Cartwright, and then, with a sudden irritation: “What the devil are you driving at, Maxell? I may see the girl—I go to music-halls, and it is hardly likely I should miss her. Naturally I am interested in the lady I have rescued from this kind of thing”—he waved his hand vaguely toward Tangier Bay—“and she may be useful. You don’t mean to say you’re struck on her?”
He tried to carry war into the enemy’s camp and failed, for Maxell’s blue eyes met his steadily.