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That's the real trouble, Ginger. My pride has been battered and chopped up and broken into as many pieces as you broke Mr. Scrymgeour's stick! What pitiful creatures we are. Girls, I mean. At least, I suppose a good many girls are like me. If Gerald had died and I had lost him that way, I know quite well I shouldn't be feeling as I do now.
As I shall explain presently, his devotion to the Arcadia very nearly married him against his will; but first I must describe his boudoir. We always called it Scrymgeour's boudoir after it had ceased to deserve the censure, just as we called Moggridge Jimmy because he was Jimmy to some of us as a boy.
One day, some weeks after we left Scrymgeour's house-boat, I was alone in my rooms, very busy smoking, when William John entered with a telegram. It was from Scrymgeour, and said, "You have got me into a dreadful mess. Come down here first train."
No, Scrymgeour; your only honorable course is marriage." "But you must help me. It is all your fault, teaching me to like the Arcadia Mixture." I thought this so impudent of Scrymgeour that I bade him good-night at once. All the men on the stair are still confident that he would have married her, had the lady not cut the knot by eloping with Scrymgeour's double.
He and Primus had a scheme for seizing a lugger and becoming pirates, when Primus was to be captain, William John first lieutenant, and old Poppy a prisoner. To the crew was added a boy with a catapult, one Johnny Fox, who was another victim of the tyrant Poppy, and they practised walking the plank at Scrymgeour's window.
They made for Scrymgeour's house-boat, with almost no words on the young man's part; but the father blurted out several things as that his daughter knew where he was going when he left the Heathen Chinee, and that he had an hour before seen Scrymgeour making love to another girl. "Don't deny it!" cried the indignant father; "I recognized you by your velvet coat and broad hat."
"You can break it to Martha Scrymgeour's father and mither," the letter said, "and to Petey Whamond's sisters and the rest as has friends in London, that I have seen no Thrums faces here, the low part where they bide not being for the like of me to file my feet in.
At the same moment a hand gripped him by the neck, and a girl, somewhere on deck, screamed. Scrymgeour's captor, who was no other than the owner of the Heathen Chinee, dragged him fiercely into the house-boat and stormed at him for five minutes.
I watched them. Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone- planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass door, glared at him.
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.
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