"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell him my name and number!—say the orders were given by mistake! ..." Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog. Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"—the little fingers twitched in Patrine's—"what's coming in November. The other started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then—I'll own up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"
"But you have heard? You have had letters?"
The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.
"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle all squares of blacking. Not much between—except that he is tophole and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's way. He always talks as—" A shudder went through the little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:
"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about Franky—or any other man. "Are you worrying so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't wise!"
"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted—that's all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"
"When!"—Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable, turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses—a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.
One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes. Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.
Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards—a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:
"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"