"I want your advice," she began. "I"m so wretched!"
She burst into tears. I could see the poor girl was in a highly nervous condition, so I did my best to calm her by describing how I had once done the long hole in four. My friends tell me that there is no finer soporific, and it seemed as though they may be right, for presently, just as I had reached the point where I laid my approach-putt dead from a distance of fifteen feet, she became quieter. She dried her eyes, yawned once or twice, and looked at me bravely.
"I love Eddie Denton!" she said.
"I feared as much. When did you feel this coming on?"
"It crashed on me like a thunderbolt last night after dinner. We were walking in the garden, and he was just telling me how he had been bitten by a poisonous _zongo_, when I seemed to go all giddy. When I came to myself I was in Eddie"s arms. His face was pressed against mine, and he was gargling."
"Gargling?"
"I thought so at first. But he rea.s.sured me. He was merely speaking in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Walla-Walla natives of Eastern Uganda, into which he always drops in moments of great emotion. He soon recovered sufficiently to give me a rough translation, and then I knew that he loved me. He kissed me. I kissed him. We kissed each other."
"And where was Mortimer all this while?"
"Indoors, cataloguing his collection of vases."
For a moment, I confess, I was inclined to abandon Mortimer"s cause. A man, I felt, who could stay indoors cataloguing vases while his _fiancee_ wandered in the moonlight with explorers deserved all that was coming to him. I overcame the feeling.
"Have you told him?"
"Of course not."
"You don"t think it might be of interest to him?"
"How can I tell him? It would break his heart. I am awfully fond of Mortimer. So is Eddie. We would both die rather than do anything to hurt him. Eddie is the soul of honour. He agrees with me that Mortimer must never know."
"Then you aren"t going to break off your engagement?"
"I couldn"t. Eddie feels the same. He says that, unless something can be done, he will say good-bye to me and creep far, far away to some distant desert, and there, in the great stillness, broken only by the cry of the prowling _yongo_, try to forget."
"When you say "unless something can be done," what do you mean? What can be done?"
"I thought you might have something to suggest. Don"t you think it possible that somehow Mortimer might take it into his head to break the engagement himself?"
"Absurd! He loves you devotedly."
"I"m afraid so. Only the other day I dropped one of his best vases, and he just smiled and said it didn"t matter."
"I can give you even better proof than that. This morning Mortimer came to me and asked me to give him secret lessons in golf."
"Golf! But he despises golf."
"Exactly. But he is going to learn it for your sake."
"But why secret lessons?"
"Because he wants to keep it a surprise for your birthday. Now can you doubt his love?"
"I am not worthy of him!" she whispered.
The words gave me an idea.
"Suppose," I said, "we could convince Mortimer of that!"
"I don"t understand."
"Suppose, for instance, he could be made to believe that you were, let us say, a dipsomaniac."
She shook her head. "He knows that already."
"What!"
"Yes; I told him I sometimes walked in my sleep."
"I mean a secret drinker."
"Nothing will induce me to pretend to be a secret drinker."
"Then a drug-fiend?" I suggested, hopefully.
"I hate medicine."
"I have it!" I said. "A kleptomaniac."
"What is that?"
"A person who steals things."
"Oh, that"s horrid."
"Not at all. It"s a perfectly ladylike thing to do. You don"t know you do it."
"But, if I don"t know I do it, how do I know I do it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I mean, how can I tell Mortimer I do it if I don"t know?"
"You don"t tell him. I will tell him. I will inform him tomorrow that you called on me this afternoon and stole my watch and"--I glanced about the room--"my silver matchbox."
"I"d rather have that little vinaigrette."
"You don"t get either. I merely say you stole it. What will happen?"
"Mortimer will hit you with a cleek."
"Not at all. I am an old man. My white hairs protect me. What he will do is to insist on confronting me with you and asking you to deny the foul charge."