Her eyes once more were for a moment frightened.
“There was danger for poor little me?”
He nodded.
“It is past,” he assured her.
“And it is you who have saved me,” she
murmured. “Ah, Mr. John,” she added,
as she walked with him to the door, “if ever
there comes to me a lover, not for the days only but
pour la vie, I hope that he may be an Englishman
like you, whom all the world trusts.”
He laughed and raised her fingers to his lips.
“Over-faithful, you called us once,” he
reminded her.
“But that was when I was a child,” she
said, “and in days like these we are children
no longer.”
Lutchester left Sonia and the Ritz-Carlton a few minutes
before midnight, to find a great yellow moon overhead,
which seemed to have risen somewhere at the back of
Central Park. The broad thoroughfare up which
he turned seemed to have developed a new and unfamiliar
beauty. The electric lamps shone with a pale
and almost unnatural glow. The flashing lights
of the automobiles passing up and down were almost
whimsically unnecessary. Lutchester walked slowly
up Fifth Avenue in the direction of his hotel.
Something—the beauty of the night, perhaps,
or some faint aftermath of sentimentality born of
Sonia’s emotion—tempted him during
those few moments to relax. He threw aside his
mask and breathed the freer for it. Once more
he was a human being, treading the streets of a real
city, his feet very much upon the earth, his heart
full of the simplest things. All the scheming
of the last few days was forgotten, the great issues,
the fine yet devious way to be steered amidst the rocks
which beset him; even the depression of the calamitous
news from the North Sea passed away. He was a
very simple human being, and he was in love.
It was all so unpractical, so illusionary, and yet
so real. Events, actual happenings—he
thrust all thoughts of these away from his mind.
What she might be thinking of him at the moment he
ignored. He was content to let his thoughts rest
upon her, to walk through the moonlit street, his
brain and heart revelling in that subtle facility of
the imagination which brought her so easily to his
presence. It was such a vividly real Pamela,
too, who spoke and walked and moved by his side.
His memory failed him nowhere, followed faithfully
the kaleidoscopic changes in her face and tone, showed
him even that long, grateful, searching glance when
their eyes had met in Von Teyl’s sitting-room.
There had been times when she had shown clearly enough
that she was anxious to understand, anxious to believe
in him. He clung to the memory of these; pushed
into the background that faint impression he had had
of her at the roof-garden, serene and proud, yet with
a faint look of something like pain in her startled
eyes.
