THE CRY FROM THE TRAIN
"Oh, good morning, Chermside. So you have not, after all, left Ottermouth yet, as you led me to infer would be the case."
Leslie Chermside looked up from his newspaper to meet the steady gaze of Travers Nugent, who had just entered the reading room at the club. It was before the hour when the morning frequenters were wont to assemble, and for the moment they had the apartment to themselves.
"No," said Leslie shortly. "I have changed my mind, and shall stay on for a while."
Nugent carefully closed the door and came and stood with his back to the mantelpiece looking down at his late accomplice. "Does that mean that you have returned to your allegiance?" he asked softly.
"Certainly not," came Leslie's flash of indignation.
"Ah! then I presume that you found Levison amenable to reason, or, at least, that you persuaded him to grant you a reprieve when you kept your appointment with him last night?" said Nugent. Though he spoke with a great assumption of carelessness, applying a light to his cigarette the while, his eyes never left the younger man's face for an instant, seeming to burn with a snake-like glitter.
Under this keen scrutiny Leslie reddened, and his reply came haltingly at first, as though he picked his words with deliberation. "I asked no favours of Levison. He—he can do his worst for all I care." And then, moved by a sudden impulse, the ex-Lancer added hotly: "See here, Mr. Nugent. My association with you, which I deeply regret, has not been an honourable one. It is not my province to blame you, seeing how culpable I have been myself, but the subject is distasteful to me, and at least I have the right to ask that you will not again refer to the disgraceful affair that brought us together. I shall hope shortly to obtain employment which will enable me to repay the money advanced by the Maharajah for my passage home, and, so far as I am concerned, that will be an end of the business. I do not consider that I am legally or morally bound to recognize the debts which his Highness gave me to understand he had paid voluntarily. As the bribe with which he tempted me was only a sham, I owe him no allegiance whatever."
Nugent listened with upraised brows to the angry outbreak, the flicker of a frosty smile playing about his lips. But if he had meditated a rejoinder he checked it. His quick ears had caught the click of the hall door, and the hum of voices in the ante-room. He merely shrugged his shoulders, and was ready with a genial greeting for the members who trooped in. They were three in number—Mr. Montague Maynard, who had motored in from the Manor House; Mr. Vernon Mallory, whose pale, ascetic face reflected nothing of the interest inspired by finding Nugent and Chermside, obviously to his shrewd vision, concluding a heated discussion; and, lastly, but by no means least in his own estimation, General Kruse, formerly of the Indian Staff Corps.
The last-mentioned was somewhat unkindly behind his back called "the widow's Kruse," the nickname being founded on an erroneous rumour that he was pursuing with matrimonial intentions the wealthy relict of a London tradesman, who had settled in the neighbourhood. There was a still more unkind version of the origin of the nickname, and one in which there was, unfortunately, just a spice of truth—that he was "always full." He was a big, burly man, with a rubicund complexion and a voice like a thunderstorm.