II
“But I have already met them, your sister and Miss Adgate,” Bertram announced, with an occult little laugh. Pontycroft looked his surprise.
“Really? They've kept precious mum about it. When? Where?”
“The other day at Venice,” Bertram laughed. “I even had the honour of escorting them to their hotel in my gondola.”
Pontycroft's face bespoke sudden enlightenment.
“Oho!” he cried. “Then you're the mysterious stranger who came to their rescue when they were benighted at the Lido. They've told me about that. And oh, the quantities of brain-tissue they've expended wondering who you were!”
Bertram chuckled.
“But how,” asked Pontycroft, the wrinkles of his brow tied into puzzled knots, “how did you know who they were?”
“I saw them the next day when I was at the Florian with Lewis Vincent, and he told me,” Bertram explained.
Pontycroft laughed, deeply, silently. “Thank Providence I shall be present at the scene that's coming. The man of the family brings a friend home to luncheon, and lo, the ladies recognise in him their gallant rescuer. It's amazing how Real Life rushes in where Fiction fears to tread. That scene is one which has been banished from literature these thirty years, which no playwright or novelist would dare to touch; yet here is Real Life blithely serving it up to us as if it were quite fresh. It's another instance—and every one has seen a hundred—of Real Life sedulously apeing ill-constructed and unconvincing melodrama.”