We have made out, we fancy, a pretty good case for Samuel Shotter; and it was a pity that some kindly person was not present in Mr. Wrenn’s office at that moment to place these arguments before Kay. For not one of them occurred to her independently. She could see no excuse whatever for Sam’s conduct. She had wrenched herself from his grasp and moved to the other side of the desk, and across this she now regarded him with a blazing eye. Her fists were clenched and she was breathing quickly. She had the air of a girl who would have given a year’s pocket money for a copy of the Rev. Aubrey Jerningham’s Is There a Hell?
Gone was that delightful spirit of comradeship which, when he had been telling of his boyish dealings with Claude, had made him seem almost a kindred soul. Gone was that soft sensation of gratitude which had come to her on his assurance that he had not risked spoiling that repulsive youth by sparing the rod. All she felt now was that her first impressions of this young man had been right, and that she had been mauled and insulted by a black-hearted bounder whose very clothes should have warned her of his innate despicableness. It seems almost incredible that anyone should think such a thing of anybody, but it is a fact that in that instant Kay Derrick looked upon Sam as something even lower in the graduated scale of human subspecies than Claude Winnington-Bates.
As for Sam, he was still under the ether.
Nothing is more difficult for both parties concerned than to know what to say immediately after an occurrence like this. An agitated silence was brooding over the room, when the necessity for speech was removed by the re-entry of Mr. Wrenn.
Mr. Wrenn was not an observant man. Nor was he sensitive to atmosphere. He saw nothing unusual in his niece’s aspect, nothing out of the way in Sam’s. The fact that the air inside the office of Pyke’s Home Companion was quivering with charged emotion escaped his notice altogether. He addressed Sam genially.
“It is quite all right, Mr. Shotter. Lord Tilbury wishes you to start work on the Companion at once.”
Sam turned to him with the vague stare of the newly awakened sleepwalker.
“It will be nice having you in the office,” added Mr. Wrenn amiably. “I have been short-handed. By the way, Lord Tilbury asked me to send you along to him at once. He is just going out to lunch.”
“Lunch?” said Sam.
“He said you were lunching with him.”