“You knew?” he inquired thoughtfully.
She laughed; a little uncomfortably, for he was trying the operation of looking through her.
“Then you had no intention of staying over?”
He asked the question very mildly. It was quite clear that he felt not a shade of anger at the elaborate jest, but anyone could see that he was mightily disappointed.
“Staying over?” she arched her brows. “Why, Sir Richard! What a question! I am not altogether rural!”
Then he woke up, paid the driver, and plodded with her up the steep gang-plank.
Sir Richard was himself again; that is, silent and benumbed. He stood solemnly beside her and stared at the announcement on the bulletin-board that the Victoria would sail “to-morrow morning at six.” Then after a mere smiling nod for a good-night he wandered down the corridor to his stateroom.
Miss Jerry Wells found a lonely steamer-chair on the upper deck, tucked herself in with the help of a clumsy deck-steward and tried to feel guiltless. The lady from the country had had her revenge, but she did not feel very happy over it.
CHAPTER III
“SAW YUH!”
Miss Wells had other reasons for feeling guilty. Travelling about a foreign city with a man whose name she did not know, suggesting to him the dare-devil possibility of a week’s sight-seeing together, decoying him into a genuinely excitable interest in the scheme—he had been hard to work up to the due pitch; and she had some pride in her art there—and then snubbing him with the reality, these were not the main causes of her uneasiness as she loafed in the steamer-chair and listened very intently to the sound of the voices as each new group of returning tourists struggled up the gang-plank.