And Millie said: "He had to go back to the hotel for something."
But Victoria just now was frying other fish. She had at her side Angela Compton, her newest and greatest friend. She had known Angela for a week and Angela had, she said, given a new impulse to her life. Miss Compton was a slim woman with black hair, very black eyebrows and red cheeks. Her features seemed to be painted on wood and her limbs too moved jerkily to support the doll-like illusion. But she was not a doll; oh dear, no, far from it! In their first half-hour together she told Millie that what she lived for was adventure—"And I have them!" she cried, her black eyes flashing. "I have them all the time. It is an extraordinary thing that I can't move a yard without them." It was her desire to be the centre of every party, and thoroughly to attain this enviable position she was forced, so Millie very quickly suspected, to invent tales and anecdotes when the naked truth failed her. She had been to Cladgate on several other summers and was able, therefore, to bristle with personal anecdotes. "Do you see that man over there?" she would deliriously whisper. "The one with the high collar and the side-whiskers. He looks as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, but one evening last summer as I was coming in——" or "That girl! My dear. . . . Drugs—oh! I know it for a fact. Terribly sad, isn't it? But I happen to have seen——"
All these tales she told with the most innocent intentions in the world, being one, as she often assured her friends, who wouldn't hurt a fly. Victoria believed every word that fell from her lips and adored to believe.
To-day she was the greatest comfort to Millie. She could sit there in her misery and gather around her Angela's little scandals as protection.
"Oh, but it can't be!" Victoria would cry, her eyes shining.
"Oh, of course, if you don't want to believe me! I saw him staring at me days before. At last he spoke to me. We were quite alone at the moment, and I said: 'Really I'm very sorry, but I don't know you.'
"'Give me just five minutes,' he begged, 'that's all I ask. If you knew what it would mean to me.' And, I knowing all the time, my dear, about the awful things he'd been doing to his wife—I let him go on for a little while, and then very quietly I said——"
Millie stared in front of her. The impulse that she was fighting was to run after him, to find him anywhere, anywhere, to tell him that she was sorry, that it had been her fault . . . just to have his hand in hers again, to see his eyes kindly, affectionate, never, never again that fierce hostility as though he hated her and were a stranger to her, another man whom she did not know and had never seen before.
"Of course I don't blame him for drinking. After all there have been plenty of people before now who have found that too much for them, but before everybody like that! All I know is that his brother-in-law came up (mind you that is all in the strictest confidence, and—) and said before every one——"
But why should she go to him? He had been in the wrong. That he should be like the others and want to plunder Victoria, poor Victoria whom she was always defending. . . .