“Oh, he isn’t cured,” Katya said. “This is only a part of the process. It’s to get him to like me, to make him have confidence in me, so that I can get to know something about him. Now, go away. I can’t give you any verdict till I’ve studied him.”
PART V
I
IN the intervals of running from hotel to hotel—for Robert Grimshaw had taken it for granted that Ellida was right, and that Katya had gone either to the old hotel where she had stayed with Mrs. Van Husum, and where they knew she had left the heavier part of her belongings—Robert Grimshaw looked in to tell Pauline that he hadn’t yet been able to fix things up with Katya Lascarides, but that he was certainly going to do so, and would fetch her along that afternoon. In himself he felt some doubt of how he was going to find Katya. At the Norfolk Street hotel he had heard that she had called in for two or three minutes the night before in order to change her clothes—he remembered that she was wearing her light grey dress and a linen sun-hat—and that then she had gone out, saying that she was going to a patient’s, and might or might not come back.
“This afternoon,” he repeated, “I’ll bring her along.”
Pauline looked at his face attentively.
“Don’t you know where she is?” she said incredulously, and then she added, as if with a sudden desolation: “Have you quarrelled as much as all that?”
“How did you know I don’t know where she is?” Grimshaw answered swiftly. “She hasn’t been attacking you?”
Her little hands fell slowly open at her sides; then she rested one of them upon the white cloth that was just being laid for lunch.
The horn of an automobile sounded rather gently outside, and the wheels of a butcher’s cart rattled past.