“You are quite right, Miss Briskett, there is no excuse for me. I behaved like a cad. Things got me on the raw, somehow. I imagined—all sorts of things which weren’t true! That’s no excuse, I know. I should have controlled myself better. But if I was annoyed at starting on that drive, I was far more so when it came to an end. You had your revenge! And you don’t deny that you disliked me in return.”
“I did so! I did heaps more than that. I thought you just the hatefullest person I’d ever met.”
“And now?”
Cornelia laughed easily.
“Oh, well—we’ve had a pretty good time together, haven’t we? We can let bygones be bygones. You’re English—vurry, vurry English, but I guess you’re nice!”
“What do you mean by English?” But even as he put the question Captain Guest straightened himself, and reared his neck within his stiff, upstanding collar, with that air of ineffable superiority which marks the Englishman in his intercourse with “inferior” nations. Cornelia laughed, a full-throated ha-ha of amusement.
“It’s ‘English’! There’s no other word to it. You are about as English at this moment as you’ve been in the whole of your life.—I guess we must be getting pretty near London now, for I ken see nothing but smoke.”
“Yes, we are nearly there. Will you—may I call at your hotel some day, on the chance of finding you in?”
“Why, suttenly! I’d love to have you. You could take me round. If the Moffatts have fixed-up a dinner for themselves, some night, we might go to a theatre together!”
“Um—yes!” Guest surveyed her with doubtful eyes. “I suppose it would be easy enough to find some other lady to play chaperon.”