"Lieutenant Treves, sir."
A minute later John had torn open an envelope containing a telegram, which ran:
Come to me at the Gordon Hotel, Newport. Shall be there this evening. ELAINE.
Elaine's wire came to him as an utter surprise, a surprise that was tinctured with pleasure. He had never forgotten her since their first, and only meeting. He had indeed thought of her a hundred times, recalling her as she stood in the little room in Camden Town. Without doubt she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
During the past weeks every moment of his time had been occupied, and there had been no possibility of carrying out his promise to visit her.
As he walked he drew out her telegram and read it carefully through, possibly for the sixth time. The wording brought to him a measure of comfort; he felt, somehow, that she was not in so distressed a state of mind as when he had received her former wire to Bernard Treves.
"I shall see her within an hour," thought John, as he stepped into a train at Freshwater. But as the train drew nearer to Newport his high spirits evaporated; he began to argue that Elaine Treves was outside his sphere of work. Dacent Smith had impressed upon him the intense seriousness of the German menace on the South Coast; no private considerations, John told himself, held precedence of the duty that lay before him. Elaine Treves was a victim of the innocent deception he had been obliged to practise. But it was not his fault that she was an extremely beautiful woman, and that she believed him to be her husband.
At the Gordon Hotel, a small quiet, specklessly clean building, John entered the hall, and found Elaine herself descending the stairs. For a moment the girl did not notice him, and John was free to observe the daintiness of her costume, the slender dignity of her figure, and the quite astonishing beauty of her grey, long-lashed eyes. The note of pathos that had been apparent when he first met her was now not so marked. She struck him as serious, but not depressed.
Elaine had descended the stairs to the vestibule before her eyes met his.
"Oh, Bernard," she exclaimed, and instantly took his hand in her gloved fingers. "But you can't have come in answer to my wire?" she went on.