“Knows me?” said the girl, bewildered. “Who was he?”
“I’m coming to that later,” went on her brother. “Well, we had a couple more and then he suggested tearing a chop together. And I don’t know—he seemed so decent and all that—that I told him I was in the soup. Told him the whole yarn and asked his advice sort of business. Well, as I say, he was bally sporting about it all, and finally asked me who the bird was who had tied up the boodle. I told him, and here’s the lucky part of the whole show—this fellow Perrison knew him. Perrison was the man I was lunching with.”
He paused and lit a cigarette, while the girl stared at him gravely.
“Well,” she said at length, “go on.”
“It was after lunch that he got busy. He said to me: ‘Look here, Daventry, you’ve made a bally fool of yourself, but you’re not the first. I’ll write a note to Messrs. Smith and Co.’—those are the warriors who gave me the money—‘and try and persuade them to give you more time, or even possibly reduce the rate of interest.’ Of course, I was all on this, and I arranged to lunch with him again next day, after Smith and Co. had had time to function. And sure enough they did. Wrote a letter in which they were all over me; any friend of Mr. Perrison’s was entitled to special treatment, and so on and so forth. Naturally I was as bucked as a dog with two tails, and asked Perrison if I couldn’t do something more material than just thank him. And—er—he—I mean it was then he told me he knew you by sight.”
He glanced at his sister, and then quickly looked away again.
“He suggested—er—that perhaps I could arrange to introduce him to you; that it would be an honour he would greatly appreciate, and all that sort of rot.”
The girl was sitting very still. “Yes,” she said, quietly, “and you—agreed.”
“Well, of course I did. Hang it, he’s quite a decent fellow. Bit Cityish to look at, and I shouldn’t think he knows which end of a horse goes first. But he’s got me out of the devil of a hole, Sybil, and the least you can do is to be moderately decent to the bird. I mean it’s not asking much, is it? I left the governor looking at him in the hall as if he was just going to tread on his face, and that long slab—your pal—is gazing at him through his eyeglasses as if he was mad.”
“He’s not my pal, Bill.” Sybil Daventry’s colour heightened a little.