“She's got a soul worth saving.”
Then the portiere fell behind her, and nothing was said in the room until the pad of her bare feet had ceased upon the stair.
“She came out in the Bengal with us,” Hilda told him—this is not a special instance of it, but she could always gratify Duff Lindsay in advance—“and she was desperately seedy, poor girl. I looked after her a little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got me on her mind. And as the two hundred and eighty million benighted souls of India are her continual concern, I seem a superfluity. To think of being the two hundred and eighty millionth and first oppresses one.”
Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.
“You weren't at that end of the ship?” he demanded.
“Of course I was—we all were. And some of us—little Miss Stace, for instance—thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and sardines for tea every night for a whole month. And, after Suez, ices for dinner on Sundays. It was luxury.”
Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache. “I don't call it fair or friendly,” he said, “when you know how easily it could have been arranged. Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told you that the second-class saloon was no place for you. For YOU!”
Plainly she did not intend to argue the point. She poised her chin in her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help seeing, as he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful. But this had been so long acknowledged between them that she could hardly have been conscious that she was insisting on it afresh. Then by the time he might have thought her launched upon a different meditation, her mind swept back to his protest, like a whimsical bird.
“I didn't want to extract anything from the mercantile community of Calcutta in advance,” she said. “It would be most unbusinesslike. Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself, as leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season. Then I think,” she said with defiance, “that I shall avoid you.”
“And pray why?”