Next second the cab had rounded the corner and was on its way along Piccadilly. Yet he knew that he had sat there for several moments in the full glare of the electric lights in front of the Ritz Hotel, and he felt convinced that he had been recognised by the very last person in the world that he desired to encounter.
Jannaway sat there breathless, staring straight before him into the yellow mist, his eyes glaring as though an apparition had arisen before him.
He tried to laugh away his fears. After all, it must be only fancy, he reflected. Somebody bearing a strange resemblance. It could not be she! Impossible. Utterly impossible.
But if it had been she in the flesh—if she had in that instant actually recognised him! What then!
He huddled himself in the corner of the cab, coward that he was, and shuddered at the recollections that crowded through his mind.
Would he ever have entered that hansom if he had known that it would carry him into such exposure—and worse?
But from Jim Jannaway’s lips there fell a short bitter laugh. Was not his life made up by narrow “shaves?” Had not he been in hundreds of tight corners before, and with his wonderful tact and almost devilish cunning wriggled out of what would have meant ruin and imprisonment to any other man.
He had been a born adventurer, ever since his day as a stable-lad down at Newmarket, and he had the habit of laughing lightly at his own adventures, just as he was laughing now.
Would he have laughed, however, if he had but known how that chance encounter was to result?