The Fighting Chance

Agatha passed them, going into Sylvia's room for her wraps; and Quarrier turned to Sylvia: "Well?" he said, with the slightest hint of impatience.

"Can't you stay a minute?" asked Sylvia, surprised.

"Agatha is going in the motor with me. Is it anything important?"

She considered him without replying. She had never before detected that manner, that hardness in a voice always so even in quality.

"What is it?" he repeated.

She thought a moment, putting aside for the time his manner, which she could not comprehend; then: "I wanted to ask you a question--a rather ignorant one, perhaps. It's about your Amalgamated Electric Company. May I ask it, Howard?"

After a second's stare, "Certainly," he said.

"It's only this: If the other people--the Inter-County, I mean--are slowly ruining Amalgamated, why don't you stop it?"

Quarrier's eyes narrowed. "Oh! And who have you been discussing the matter with?"

"Mr. Plank," she said simply. "I asked him. He shook his head, and said I'd better ask you. And I do ask you."

For a moment he stood mute; then his lips began to shrink back over his beautiful teeth in one of his rare laughs.

"I'll be very glad to explain it some day," he said; but there was no mirth in his voice or eyes, only the snickering lip wrinkling the pallor.

"Will you not answer now?" she asked.

"No, not now. But I desire you to understand it some day--some day before November. And one or two other matters that it is necessary for you to understand. I want to explain them, Sylvia, in such a manner that you will never be likely to forget them. And I mean to; for they are never out of my mind, and I wish them to be as ineffaceably impressed on yours. … Good night."

He took her limp hand almost briskly, released it, and stepped down the stairs as Agatha entered, cloaked, to say good night.

They kissed at parting--"life embracing death"--as Mortimer had sneered on a similar occasion; then Sylvia, alone, stood in her bedroom, hands linked behind her, her lovely head bent, groping with the very ghosts of thought which eluded her, fleeing, vanishing, reappearing, to peep out at her only to fade into nothing ere she could follow where they flitted through the dark labyrinths of memory.

The major, craning his neck in the bay-window, saw Agatha and Quarrier enter the big, yellow motor, and disappear behind the limousine. And it worried him horribly, because he knew perfectly well that Quarrier had lied to him about a jewelled collar precisely like the collar worn by Agatha Caithness; and what to do or what to say to anybody on the subject was, for the first time in his life, utterly beyond his garrulous ability. So, for the first time also in his chattering career, he held his tongue, reassured at moments, at other moments panic-stricken lest this marriage he had engineered should go amiss, and his ambitions be nipped at the very instant of triumphant maturity.