“Always,” said the other promptly.
This woman did not appeal to him. Timothy possessed a seventh sense which he called his “Sorter,” and Miss Sadie O’Grady was already sorted into the heap of folks who, had life been a veritable voyage, would have been labelled “Not Wanted.”
He held out his hand to Ellsberger.
“I’m going by the next boat to New York,” he said, “then I’ll go to California. Maybe I’ll take in Kempton on my way, for a fellow I met at the hotel has a horse running which can catch pigeons. Good-bye, Miss O’Grady. I wish you every kind of luck.”
She watched him disappear, sensing his antagonism and responding thereto. If he could judge women by intuition, she judged him by reason, and she knew that here was a man whose mental attitude was one of dormant hostility.
It would be unfair to her to say that it was because she recognised the clean mind and the healthy outlook and the high principles of this young man that she disliked him. She was not wholly bad, because she had been the victim of circumstances and had lately lived a two-thousand pound life on a one-hundred pound capacity. She looked after him, biting her lips as though she were solving a great problem.
Presently she turned to Ellsberger.
“I’ll write to Sir John,” she said.
By a curious coincidence Timothy Anderson had the idea of approaching Sir John Maxell also, though nearly a year passed before he carried his idea into execution.