Lady Eglington’s face became rigid. “Well, yes,” she said slowly, “the maiden was saved. She is now my maid. Hamley may have been shocked, but Claridge Pasha has every reason to be glad that he helped a fellow-being in trouble.”
“Your maid—Heaver?” asked Eglington in surprise, a swift shadow crossing his face.
“Yes; she only told me this morning. Perhaps she had seen that Claridge Pasha was coming to England. I had not, however. At any rate, Quixotism saved her.”
David smiled. “It is better than I dared to hope,” he remarked quietly.
“But that is not all,” continued Hylda. “There is more. She had been used badly by a man who now wants to marry her—has tried to do so for years. Now, be prepared for a surprise, for it concerns you rather closely, Eglington. Fate is a whimsical jade. Whom do you think it is? Well, since you could never guess, it was Jasper Kimber.”
Eglington’s eyes opened wide. “This is nothing but a coarse and impossible stage coincidence,” he laughed. “It is one of those tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination. Life is laughing at us again. The longer I live, the more I am conscious of being an object of derision by the scene-shifters in the wings of the stage. What a cynical comedy life is at the best!”
“It all seems natural enough,” rejoined David.
“It is all paradox.”
“Isn’t it all inevitable law? I have no belief in ‘antic Fate.’”
Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of outlook on life between the two men. She suddenly remembered the words of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life: “By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart.”