He perceived that a serious adventure was happening to him and that he was called upon to exert himself. He had suddenly been called away from his tea and hot tea-cake to hunt a slightly demented comparative stranger about London. He wanted to do it, and he wanted to do it properly and in a way to impress Christina Alberta. And his intelligence told him that the best thing he could do would be to follow upon the probable track of his quarry and come up with him before he got into mischief. Or while he was getting into mischief—and interfere and carry him off. And meanwhile his more exercised lower nature was exhorting him to leave Christina Alberta to do the pursuing alone, and go back as straightly as possible to his ample arm-chair and sit down and think things out. And then go to his best club to dinner. And in fact quietly and neatly get out of this unexpected and tiresome business altogether.
And then he looked at Christina Alberta and realized that he could do nothing of the sort. He couldn’t leave her. He looked at her profile, the profile of a grave child, and an almost maternal emotion was aroused in him. She looked with anxious and perplexed eyes at the blue and limitless city that had swallowed up her Daddy. The scene was still warm with the evening sun-glow, but the blue twilight gathered in the lower eastern sky. Here and there a yellow pin-point showed that London was beginning to light itself up. She couldn’t go down that road alone. Absurdly, preposterously they were linked. The impulse to disentangle himself was the impulse of a selfish discretion that was rapidly taking all the happiness out of his life and leaving security and luxuries in its place. This was a call to that latent Paul Lambone to act. Even supposing she was a common, queer little flapper that his imagination had made into a friend and heroine, was that any reason whatever why he shouldn’t see her through this trouble that had come upon her?
He made his decision.
“He won’t go back for ages,” he said following up the problem. “Nobody would on an evening like this.”
“No,” she said. “But I don’t see that that gives me any hint of what I ought to do next.”
“We can keep together and go down towards Trafalgar Square. We might look along the Embankment. When we are tired we can get some dinner somewhere. You can get a sort of dinner almost anywhere I suppose. We shall want our dinner.... Perhaps it’s not so hopeless a job as it seems at first. A big job but not a hopeless one. There are limitations to what he may do. Limitations in himself I mean. I don’t think he’ll go into uninteresting streets. His feeling is—spectacular. He’s much more likely to keep to open spaces and near conspicuous buildings. That cuts out a lot of streets. And he won’t go far east. In another hour the city will be shutting up and going home and putting out its lights. He’ll turn back out of that—westward.”
“You can spare the time?”
“I’ve no engagements at all to-night. It was to have been an ‘off’ night. And this business attracts me. It is interesting to see just how far we can infer and guess his proceedings. It’s a curious mental exercise.... Do you know I think we shall find him!”
She stood quite still for some moments.
“It’s awfully good of you to come with me,” she said.