Abbie pleaded with her in vain to stay to supper. She would not be persuaded. She walked to her own bungalow and cooked herself a little meal of her own. She felt stained once more with vicarious guilt, and wondered what she had done so to be pursued and lassoed by the crimes of others.
She remembered that she had lost her chance to clear herself of Sir Joseph Webling’s guilt by keeping his secret. If she had gone to the British authorities with her first suspicion of Sir Joseph and Nicky Easton she would have escaped from sharing their guilt. She would have been branded as an informer, but only by the conspirators; and Sir Joseph himself and Lady Webling might have been saved from self-destruction.
Now she was in the same situation almost exactly. Again she had only suspicion for her guide. But in England she had been a foreigner and Sir Joseph was her benefactor. Here she was in her own country, and she owed nothing to Jake Nuddle, who was a low brute, as ruthless to his wife as to his flag.
It came to Mamise with a sharp suddenness that her one clear duty was to tell Davidge what she knew about Jake. It was not a pretty duty, but it was a definite. She resolved that the first thing she did in the morning would be to go to Davidge with what facts she had. The resolution brought her peace, and she sat down to her meager supper with a sense of pleasant righteousness.
Mamise felt so redeemed that she took up a novel, lighted a cigarette, and sat down by her lamp to pass a well-earned evening of spinsterial respectability. Then the door opened and Abbie walked in. Abbie did not think it sisterly to knock. She paused to register her formal protest against Mamise’s wicked addiction to tobacco.
“I must say, Mamise, I do wisht you’d break yourself of that horbul habbut.”
Mamise laughed tolerantly. “You were cooking cabbage when I was at your house. Why can’t I cook this vegetable?”
“But I wa’n’t cooking the cabbage in my face.”
“You were cooking it in mine. But let’s not argue about botany or ethics.”