"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to yours, you know."
"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker!—called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."
"Whe—ew!"
Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.
"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook a lot, under the circumstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment began——" goes on rueful Captain Bingo.
"—Rather!" confirms Beauvayse.—"Lived in the hotel cellar for the first fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and liqueur-cases after dark——"
"—To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."
"That gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in accents muffled by his long tumbler.
"By the Living Tinker!" asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found her gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the Chief, sayin'—he read it to me—that she'd gone to retrieve the Past, with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her despised sex—underlined, 'despised sex'—can be useful to her country."
"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what way?"