“What?”
“You need not trouble to deny it. I saw you with my own eyes lunching together at the Savoy, and I happen to know that this afternoon you took her to the theatre.”
Sam looked at him dizzily.
“You aren’t—you can’t by any chance be referring to Miss Derrick?”
“Of course I am referring to Miss Derrick.”
So stupendous was Sam’s amazement that anybody could describe what was probably the world’s greatest and most beautiful romance as “becoming entangled with a girl” that he could only gape.
“I cabled to Mr. Pynsent, informing him of the circumstances and asking for instructions.”
“You did what?” Sam’s stupor of astonishment had passed away, whirled to the four winds on a tempestuous rush of homicidal fury. “You mean to tell me that you had the—the nerve—the insolence——” He gulped. Being a young man usually quick to express his rare bursts of anger in terms of action, he looked longingly at Lord Tilbury, regretting that the latter’s age and physique disqualified him as a candidate for assault and battery. “Do you mean to tell me——” He swallowed rapidly. The thought of this awful little man spying upon Kay and smirching her with his loathly innuendoes made mere words inadequate.
“I informed Mr. Pynsent that you were conducting a clandestine love affair and asked him what I was to do.”
To Sam, like some blessed inspiration, there came a memory of a scene that had occurred in his presence abaft the fiddley of the tramp steamer Araminta when that vessel was two days out of New York. A dreamy able-bodied seaman, thoughts of home or beer having temporarily taken his mind off his job, had chanced to wander backward onto the foot of the bos’n while the latter was crossing the deck with a full pot of paint in his hands. And the bos’n, recovering his breath, had condensed his feelings into two epithets so elastic and comprehensive that, while they were an exact description of the able-bodied seaman, they applied equally well to Lord Tilbury. Indeed, it seemed to Sam that they might have been invented expressly for Lord Tilbury’s benefit.