"It pays for a marriage-licence."
Sally gave his arm another squeeze.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said. "Look at this man. Observe him. My partner!"
CHAPTER II. ENTER GINGER
1
Sally was sitting with her back against a hillock of golden sand, watching with half-closed eyes the denizens of Roville-sur-Mer at their familiar morning occupations. At Roville, as at most French seash.o.r.e resorts, the morning is the time when the visiting population a.s.sembles in force on the beach. Whiskered fathers of families made cheerful patches of colour in the foreground. Their female friends and relatives cl.u.s.tered in groups under gay parasols. Dogs roamed to and fro, and children dug industriously with spades, ever and anon suspending their labours in order to smite one another with these handy implements. One of the dogs, a poodle of military aspect, wandered up to Sally: and discovering that she was in possession of a box of sweets, decided to remain and await developments.
Few things are so pleasant as the antic.i.p.ation of them, but Sally"s vacation had proved an exception to this rule. It had been a magic month of lazy happiness. She had drifted luxuriously from one French town to another, till the charm of Roville, with its blue sky, its Casino, its snow-white hotels along the Promenade, and its general glitter and gaiety, had brought her to a halt. Here she could have stayed indefinitely, but the voice of America was calling her back. Gerald had written to say that "The Primrose Way" was to be produced in Detroit, preliminary to its New York run, so soon that, if she wished to see the opening, she must return at once. A sc.r.a.ppy, hurried, unsatisfactory letter, the letter of a busy man: but one that Sally could not ignore.
She was leaving Roville to-morrow.
To-day, however, was to-day: and she sat and watched the bathers with a familiar feeling of peace, revelling as usual in the still novel sensation of having nothing to do but bask in the warm sunshine and listen to the faint murmur of the little waves.
But, if there was one drawback, she had discovered, to a morning on the Roville plage, it was that you had a tendency to fall asleep: and this is a degrading thing to do so soon after breakfast, even if you are on a holiday. Usually, Sally fought stoutly against the temptation, but to-day the sun was so warm and the whisper of the waves so insinuating that she had almost dozed off, when she was aroused by voices close at hand. There were many voices on the beach, both near and distant, but these were talking English, a novelty in Roville, and the sound of the familiar tongue jerked Sally back from the borders of sleep. A few feet away, two men had seated themselves on the sand.
From the first moment she had set out on her travels, it had been one of Sally"s princ.i.p.al amus.e.m.e.nts to examine the strangers whom chance threw in her way and to try by the light of her intuition to fit them out with characters and occupations: nor had she been discouraged by an almost consistent failure to guess right. Out of the corner of her eye she inspected these two men.
The first of the pair did not attract her. He was a tall, dark man whose tight, precise mouth and rather high cheeks bones gave him an appearance vaguely sinister. He had the dusky look of the clean-shaven man whose life is a perpetual struggle with a determined beard. He certainly shaved twice a day, and just as certainly had the self-control not to swear when he cut himself. She could picture him smiling nastily when this happened.
"Hard," diagnosed Sally. "I shouldn"t like him. A lawyer or something, I think."
She turned to the other and found herself looking into his eyes. This was because he had been staring at Sally with the utmost intentness ever since his arrival. His mouth had opened slightly. He had the air of a man who, after many disappointments, has at last found something worth looking at.
"Rather a dear," decided Sally.
He was a st.u.r.dy, thick-set young man with an amiable, freckled face and the reddest hair Sally had ever seen. He had a square chin, and at one angle of the chin a slight cut. And Sally was convinced that, however he had behaved on receipt of that wound, it had not been with superior self-control.
"A temper, I should think," she meditated. "Very quick, but soon over.
Not very clever, I should say, but nice."
She looked away, finding his fascinated gaze a little embarra.s.sing.
The dark man, who in the objectionably competent fashion which, one felt, characterized all his actions, had just succeeded in lighting a cigarette in the teeth of a strong breeze, threw away the match and resumed the conversation, which had presumably been interrupted by the process of sitting down.
"And how is Scrymgeour?" he inquired.
"Oh, all right," replied the young man with red hair absently. Sally was looking straight in front of her, but she felt that his eyes were still busy.
"I was surprised at his being here. He told me he meant to stay in Paris."
There was a slight pause. Sally gave the attentive poodle a piece of nougat.
"I say," observed the red-haired young man in clear, penetrating tones that vibrated with intense feeling, "that"s the prettiest girl I"ve seen in my life!"
2
At this frank revelation of the red-haired young man"s personal opinions, Sally, though considerably startled, was not displeased. A broad-minded girl, the outburst seemed to her a legitimate comment on a matter of public interest. The young man"s companion, on the other hand, was unmixedly shocked.
"My dear fellow!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.
"Oh, it"s all right," said the red-haired young man, unmoved. "She can"t understand. There isn"t a bally soul in this dashed place that can speak a word of English. If I didn"t happen to remember a few odd bits of French, I should have starved by this time. That girl," he went on, returning to the subject most imperatively occupying his mind, "is an absolute topper! I give you my solemn word I"ve never seen anybody to touch her. Look at those hands and feet. You don"t get them outside France. Of course, her mouth is a bit wide," he said reluctantly.
Sally"s immobility, added to the other"s a.s.surance concerning the linguistic deficiencies of the inhabitants of Roville, seemed to rea.s.sure the dark man. He breathed again. At no period of his life had he ever behaved with anything but the most scrupulous correctness himself, but he had quailed at the idea of being a.s.sociated even remotely with incorrectness in another. It had been a black moment for him when the red-haired young man had uttered those few kind words.
"Still you ought to be careful," he said austerely.
He looked at Sally, who was now dividing her attention between the poodle and a raffish-looking mongrel, who had joined the party, and returned to the topic of the mysterious Scrymgeour.
"How is Scrymgeour"s dyspepsia?"
The red-haired young man seemed but faintly interested in the vicissitudes of Scrymgeour"s interior.
"Do you notice the way her hair sort of curls over her ears?" he said.
"Eh? Oh, pretty much the same, I think."
"What hotel are you staying at?"
"The Normandie."
Sally, dipping into the box for another chocolate cream, gave an imperceptible start. She, too, was staying at the Normandie. She presumed that her admirer was a recent arrival, for she had seen nothing of him at the hotel.
"The Normandie?" The dark man looked puzzled. "I know Roville pretty well by report, but I"ve never heard of any Hotel Normandie. Where is it?"
"It"s a little shanty down near the station. Not much of a place. Still, it"s cheap, and the cooking"s all right."
His companion"s bewilderment increased.
"What on earth is a man like Scrymgeour doing there?" he said. Sally was conscious of an urgent desire to know more and more about the absent Scrymgeour. Constant repet.i.tion of his name had made him seem almost like an old friend. "If there"s one thing he"s fussy about..."
"There are at least eleven thousand things he"s fussy about,"
interrupted the red-haired young man disapprovingly. "Jumpy old blighter!"
"If there"s one thing he"s particular about, it"s the sort of hotel he goes to. Ever since I"ve known him he has always wanted the best. I should have thought he would have gone to the Splendide." He mused on this problem in a dissatisfied sort of way for a moment, then seemed to reconcile himself to the fact that a rich man"s eccentricities must be humoured. "I"d like to see him again. Ask him if he will dine with me at the Splendide to-night. Say eight sharp."