“After all I did to you?”
To his surprise a bright blush spread over her face where it lay framed by the pillows; she turned her head abruptly and lay without speaking.
He sat thinking for a few minutes, then leaning forward from where he sat on the bed’s edge:
“After a man’s been shot at and further intimidated 192 with a large, unpleasantly rusty Kurdish dagger, he is likely to proceed without ceremony. All the same, I am sorry I had to humiliate you, Scheherazade.”
She lay silent, unstirring.
“A girl would never forgive that, I know,” he said. “So I shall look for a short shrift from you if your opportunity ever comes.”
The girl appeared to be asleep. He stood up and looked down at her. The colour had faded from the one cheek visible. For a while he listened to her quiet breathing, then, the imp of perversity seizing him, and intensely diverted by the situation, he bent over her, touched her cheek with his lips, put on his hat, took box and suitcase, and went out to spend the remaining hour or two in the smoking room, leaving her to sleep in peace.
But no sooner had he closed the door on her than the girl sat straight up on the sofa, her face surging in colour, and her eyes brilliant with starting tears.
When the train arrived at the Grand Central Station, in the grey of a July morning, Neeland, finding the stateroom empty, lingered to watch for her among the departing passengers.
But he lingered in vain; and presently a taxicab took him and his box to the Cunard docks, and deposited him there. And an hour later he was in his cabin on board that vast ensemble of machinery and luxury, the Cunarder Volhynia, outward bound, and headed straight at the dazzling disc of the rising sun.