For Helen’s love he still waited, hungry and denied. But his dreams of the air were fast coming true.
Helen had no comrades in these drear days, and scarcely kept up an acquaintance. Angela Hilary had refused to be “shunted,” as she termed it, and she and Horace Latham gained Helen’s odd half-hours oftener than any one else did. The girl had always “enjoyed” Angela, and when sorrow came, gifting her with some of its own wonderful clairvoyance, she had quickly sensed the worth and the tenderness of the persistent woman. And Dr. Latham was secure in her interest and liking, because she associated him closely with her father, and remembered warmly his tact and kindness in the first hours of her bereavement. And, sorry as her own plight was, and dreary as her daily life, she could not be altogether dull to the pretty contrivances and the nice management of the older girl’s love-affair. Grief itself could but find some amusement and take some warmth from Angela’s brilliant, deft handling of that difficult matter. It would have made a colder onlooker than Helen tingle—and sometimes gasp. It certainly made Latham tingle, and not infrequently gasp.
CHAPTER XX
Begun half in fun, the pretty widow’s advance towards the physician had grown a little out of her own entire control, and she found herself in some danger of being hoist by her own petard. Easy enough she found it to handle the man—she had handled men from her cradle—but she found her own wild heart not quite so manageable.
Helen half expected Angela to make the proposal which Latham, the girl felt sure, never would. She was sure that Angela was in deadly earnest now, and she was confident that in love, as in frolic, Angela would stick at nothing.
And Angela was in deadly earnest now—the deadliest. But she had no intention of proposing to Horace. She knew a trick worth ten of that.
Wah-No-Tee still stood to Mrs. Hilary for friend, philosopher and guide, but, believed in as staunchly as ever, she was sought rather less frequently, and on the affair-Latham the disembodied spirit, who was also “quite a lady,” was consulted not at all. For the subjugation of the physician Angela Hilary besought no sibyl, bought no love-philter.
She lived, when in London, in a tiny private hotel, just off Bond Street, and as expensive as it was small. In her sitting-room there Latham and she were lounging close to the log-heaped fire one dark December day, exploiting an afternoon tea transatlantically heterogeneous.
“You know, I don’t approve of this at all,” the medico said, shaking his head at hot muffins heavy with butter and whipped cream, his hand hovering undecidedly over toasted marshmallows and a saline liaison of popcorn and peanuts. “We deserve to be very ill, both of us—and my country is at war, and the Morning Post says——”
“Food-shortage! Eat less bread!” Angela gurgled, burying her white teeth in a very red peach. “Well, there’s no bread here, not a crust. And the children in the East End and badly wounded Tommies might not thrive on this fare of mine.”