Part 4 (2/2)
”Yet at least two hours ago he'd arranged a meeting with Maxine for to-morrow afternoon.”
”You're dreaming.”
”I was never wider awake: or if I'm dreaming, you can dream the same dream if you'll be at Victoria Station to-morrow, or rather this morning, when the boat train goes out at 10 o'clock.”
”I will be there!” cried Di, changing from red to white. ”And you shall be with me, to see that you're wrong. I know you will be wrong.”
”That's an engagement,” said I. ”At 10 o'clock, Victoria Station, just you and I, and n.o.body else in the house the wiser. If I'm right, and Ivor's there, shall you think it wise to give him up?”
”He might be obliged to go to Paris, suddenly, for some business reason, without meaning to call on Maxine de Renzie--in which case he'd probably write me. But--at the station, I shall ask him straight out--that is, if he's there, as I'm sure he won't be--whether he intends to see Mademoiselle de Renzie. If he says no, I'll believe him. If he says yes--”
”You'll tell him all is over between you?”
”He'd know that without my telling, after our talk last night.”
”And whatever happens, you will say nothing about having heard Maxine's name from me?”
”Nothing,” Di answered. And I knew she would keep her word.
IVOR DUNDAS' POINT OF VIEW
CHAPTER IV
IVOR TRAVELS TO PARIS
It is rather a startling sensation for a man to be caught suddenly by the nape of the neck, so to speak, and pitched out of heaven down to--the other place.
But that was what happened to me when I arrived at Victoria Station, on my way to Paris.
I had taken my ticket and hurried on to the platform without too much time to spare (I'd been warned not to risk observation by being too early) when I came face to face with the girl whom, at any other time, I should have liked best to meet: whom at that particular time I least wished to meet: Diana Forrest.
”The Imp”--Lisa Drummond--was with her: but I saw only Di at first--Di, looking a little pale and hara.s.sed, but beautiful as always. Only last night I had told her that Paris had no attractions for me. I had said that I didn't care to see Maxine de Renzie: yet here I was on the way to see her, and here was Di discovering me in the act of going to see, her.
Of course I could lie; and I suppose some men, even men of honour, would think it justifiable as well as wise to lie in such a case, when explanations were forbidden. But I couldn't lie to a girl I loved as I love Diana Forrest. It would have sickened me with life and with myself to do it: and it was with the knowledge in my mind that I could not and would not lie, that I had to greet her with a conventional ”Good morning.”
”Are you going out of town?” I asked, with my hat off for her and for the Imp, whose strange little weazened face I now saw looking over my tall love's shoulders. It had never before struck me that the Imp was like a cat; but suddenly the resemblance struck me--something in the poor little creature's expression, it must have been, or in her greenish grey eyes which seemed at that moment to concentrate all the knowledge of old and evil things that has ever come into the world since the days of the early Egyptians--when a cat was wors.h.i.+pped.
”No, I'm not going out of town,” Di answered. ”I came here to meet you, in case you should be leaving by this train, and I brought Lisa with me.”
”Who told you I was leaving?” I asked, hoping for a second or two that the Foreign Secretary had confided to her something of his secret--guessing ours, perhaps, and that my unexpected, inexplicable absence might injure me with her.
”I can't tell you,” she answered. ”I didn't believe you would go; even though I got your letter by the eight o'clock post this morning.”
”I'm glad you got that,” I said. ”I posted it soon after I left you last night.”
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