The Incomplete Amorist

"Quick!" she said, "Shall we go? Hadn't you better bring her back here? Go after her at once."

"You're an angel," said Vernon. "No, don't go. Temple, look after Lady St. Craye. If you'll not think me rude?--Miss Desmond is in trouble, I'm afraid."

"Of course she is--poor little thing. Oh, Mr. Vernon, do run! She looks quite despairing. There's your hat. Go--go!"

The door banged behind her.

The other two, left alone, looked at each other.

"I wonder--" said she.

"Yes," said he, "it's certainly mysterious."

"We ought to have gone at once," said she. "I should have done, of course, only Mr. Vernon so elaborately explained that he expected her. One had to play up. And so she's a friend of yours?"

"She's not a friend of mine," said Temple rather ruefully, "and I didn't know Vernon was a friend of hers. You saw that she wouldn't have my company at any price."

"Mr. Vernon's a friend of her people, I believe. We saw her the other day in the Bois, and he told me he knew them in England. Did you know them there too? Poor child, what a woe-begone little face it was!"

"No, not in England. I met her in Paris about a fortnight ago, but she didn't like me, from the first, and our acquaintance broke off short."

There was a silence. Lady St. Craye perceived a ring-fence of reticence round the subject that interested her, and knew that she had no art strong enough to break it down.

She spoke again suddenly: "Do you know you're not a bit the kind of man I expected you to be, Mr. Temple? I've heard so much of you from Mr. Vernon. We're such old friends, you know."

"Apparently he can't paint so well with words as he does with oils. May I ask exactly how flattering the portrait was?"

"It wasn't flattering at all.--In fact it wasn't a portrait."

"A caricature?"

"But you don't mind what people say of you, do you?"

"You are trying to frighten me."

"No, really," she said with pretty earnestness; "it's only that he has always talked about you as his best friend, and I imagined you would be like him."

Temple's uneasy wonderings about Betty's trouble, her acquaintance with Vernon, the meaning of her visit to him, were pushed to the back of his mind.