"It was just as we got into the Channel." The expression in his eyes had grown dreamy and distant. "We were on deck, she and I——"
"I will not submit to this, Jim!" I said.
He laughed as a drunken man laughs.
"If you won't, somebody else will have to," he said. "I'm—I'm simply bursting with it. For sheer dullness—on my soul, George, I'll never ask you to lunch with me again, in this world or the next."
"The veiled compliment is wasted on you," I said.
As I walked home, I took stock of the position. Granted that I had been dull, I was no actor and could affect little rapture at the prospect of losing my best friend, however deep his momentary intoxication. And every word that Amy had said to me at House of Steynes the previous summer stood as true as when she spoke it, and I added my endorsement. Sonia had been as entirely charming on that occasion as she had been exasperating in the same place some years earlier when Crabtree first proposed to her. If I have suggested corporal punishment for her, it must be remembered that bachelors are sometimes lacking in the finer chivalry; but which Sonia Jim was marrying remained, I felt, to be seen. There would, indeed, be discoveries, on both sides, for Loring at nine-and-twenty had his share of angularity.
And I was not easy in my mind about the way O'Rane would take the news. It is true I had never regarded his attachment very seriously from the time when the undergraduate of twenty became engaged to the temporary debutante of sixteen; true also that three and a half years abroad had probably made a very different man of him. At the same time, I recalled his passionate outburst on the lawn at Crowley Court when Lady Dainton declined to recognize the engagement; and it did not need a man who knew him as well as I did to appreciate his curious tenacity of character. I came to feel that the news would hit him hard.
My letter of explanation was not easy to write. I roughed out one draft and tore it up; then a second, then a third. Bertrand put his head in at my door to say he was dining at the House, and I hurriedly changed my clothes and drove down to the Club. There I made a fourth attempt as unsatisfactory as the first three, thrust it impatiently into my pocket, and walked into the hall to read the latest telegrams.
"You said eight o'clock. I'm before my time, but I'll wait out in St. James's Street if you like."
I spun round at the touch of fingers on my shoulders. Only one voice in the world held as much music in it—low and vibrant, setting my nerves a-tingle.