“Jolly nice woman, Mrs. Laing. No nonsense about her. We’ve bin together the last half hour, an’ I’m under the starter’s orders, at any rate.”
“Why not go in and win?” demanded Evelyn, taking a kindly interest in the Honorable one’s matrimonial prospects. If he and Mrs. Laing made a match of it, that would provide a very agreeable close to a disquieting incident.
“I’m afraid it’ll only be to make the runnin’ for some other Johnny,” sighed he. “I was gettin’ along like a house a–fire, when all at once she remembered she hadn’t said what she wanted to say in a letter to a Captain somebody at Ostend, an’ off she waltzed to her room. She’s probably writin’ sweet nothings to him now. Same old story—Billy Thring left at the post. Gad, that’s funny! See it, eh, what?”
Thring was so amused by his own wit that he did not notice the expression of pain and fear that drove the brightness from Evelyn’s face. But she herself was conscious of it, and looked away lest he should peer into her eyes, and wonder. So Mrs. Laing was writing to Arthur! She knew his address! How strange, how unutterably strange, that he had not once mentioned her name! The girl, as in a dream, affected to be watching a boy, the son of the village post–mistress, coming up the avenue. For the sake of hearing her own voice in such commonplace words as she might dare to utter, she drew her companion’s attention.
“Here is our telegraph messenger,” she said.
Thring glanced at his watch.
“It’s for me,” he announced. “There’s a chap at Newmarket who is the champion loser–finder of the world, an’ I’m one of his victims. This is Leger day, an’ if you wait a moment I’ll put you onto a stiff ‘un, sure thing. Then you must turn bookmaker at lunch, and win gloves right and left—in pairs, in fact. I’ll stand your losses if my prophet has gone mad an’ sent a winner.”
The boy made straight for him, and commenced to unfasten the pouch slung to his belt.
“See? I told you,” laughed Billy, opening the message.