class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[17]"/>

CHAPTER II

FATE GOES A-FISHING

Roger told me afterward that he literally could not say if it were five seconds or five minutes that he looked into the girl's eyes. He has since leaned to the opinion that it was nearer five minutes, because even the news-woman stared at him and the passing street boys had already begun to collect. Some subconscious realisation of this finally enabled him to drag his eyes away, very much as one drags himself awake when he must, and to realise the picture he presented—a dazed man confronting an extraordinarily lovely girl with her fist full of banknotes on a Broadway kerbstone. An interested cabby caught his eye, wagged his whip masterfully, wheeled up to them and with an apparently complete grasp of the situation whirled them off through a side street with never so much as a "Where to, sir?"

And so he found himself alone with an unknown beauty in a hansom cab, for all the world like a mysterious hero of melodrama, and Roger hated melodrama and was never mysterious in all his life, to say nothing of disliking mystery in anyone connected with him. He says he was extremely angry at this juncture and I believe him.

"What is your name?" he asked shortly. "Have you no parents or friends to protect you from the consequences of this crazy performance? Where do you live?"

"My name is Margarita," she replied directly and pleasantly, "I never had but one parent and he died a few days ago. I live by the sea."

An ugly thrill shot down his spine. No healthy person likes to be alone with a mad woman, and under a brilliant fleeting light he studied her curiously only to receive the certain conviction that whatever his companion might be, she was not mad. Her slate-blue eyes were calm and bright, her lips rather noticeably firm for all their curves—and the mad woman's mouth bewrayeth her inevitably under scrutiny. Nor was she drugged into some passing vacancy of mind: her whole atmosphere breathed a perfectly conscious control of her movements, however misguided the event might prove them. Before this conviction he hesitated slightly.

"You have another name, however," he said gently, "and what do you mean by the sea? What sea?"

For it occurred to him that although her English was perfect, she might be an utter stranger to the country, unthinkably abandoned, with sufficient means to salve her betrayer's conscience.

"Is there more than one sea, then?" she inquired of him with interest. "I thought there was only mine. It is a very large one with high waves—and cold," she added as an after-thought.

Roger gasped. "You did not tell me your other name," he said.

"Joséphine," she replied readily, pronouncing the name in the French manner.

"But you have another still?"

"Yes. Dolores," she said, with an evidently accustomed Spanish accent.

"And the last name?" he persisted in despair, noting with some busy corner of his mind that they were drifting down Fifth Avenue.

"That is all there are," she assured him, "surely three different names are sufficient for one person? I do not use the last two—only Margarita."

Roger squared his shoulders, took the banknotes from her unresisting hand and gravely folded them into her bag before he spoke again.

"Listen to me, Miss Margarita," he said slowly and with exaggerated articulation, as one speaks to a child, "what was your father's name? What did the people in the town you live in call him?"

"I told you we lived by the sea—did you forget?" she answered, a shade reprovingly. "There is no town at all. And there are no people. We live alone."

"But your servants must have called him something?" he persisted.

"Hester called my father 'sir' and the boy cannot talk, of course," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because he is dumb. His name is Caliban," she added hastily, "and he has no other, only that one."

"What is Hester's name?" Roger demanded doggedly.

"Hester Prynne," said Margarita Joséphine Dolores, "and I have had nothing to eat since the man with the shining buttons gave me meat between bread a great many hours ago. I wish I might see another such man. He might be willing to give me more. Will you look out and tell me if you see one?"

"For heaven's sake," Roger cried, "you are hungry! You should have said so before—why didn't you?"

He called out a name to the cabman who took them quickly to a place now called "the old one," because the new one is filled with people who endeavour consistently to look newer than they are, I suppose. The wine is newer certainly, and the manners. At this place, then, in a quaint old corner, they found themselves, and Roger bespoke a meal calculated to please a young woman far more exigent than this lonely dweller by the sea was likely to be. The clearest of soups, the driest of sherry in a tiny glass, something called by the respectful and understanding waiter "sôle frite," which was at any rate, quite as good as if it had been that, a hot and savoury poulet rôti—and Roger, who had been too busy to take luncheon, looked about him, contentedly well fed, rested his eyes with the clean, coarse linen, the red wine in its straw basket that had come with the poulet, the quiet, worn fittings of the little old-world place, and realised with a shock of surprise that his companion had not spoken a word since the meal began.

This was obviously not because she was famished, though she had the healthy hunger of the creature not yet done with growing, but because, simply, she felt no necessity for speech. She was evidently thinking, for her eyes had the fixed absorption of a child's who dreams over his bread and milk, but conversation she had none. He studied her, amused partly, partly lost in her beauty, for indeed she was beautiful. She had a pure olive skin, running white into the neck—oh, the back of Margarita's neck! That tender nape with its soft, nearly blonde locks that curled short about it below the heavy waves of what she called her "real hair." That was chestnut, dark brown at night. Nature had given her long dark lashes with perfect verisimilitude, but had at the last moment capriciously decided against man's peace and hidden behind them, set deep behind them under flexible Italian brows, those curious slate-blue eyes that fixed her face in your mind inalterably. You could not forget her. I know, because I have been trying for twenty years.

"You are not, I take it, accustomed to dining out, Miss Margarita?" said Roger, amused, contented, ignorant of the cause of his sudden sense of absolute bien être, or attributing it, man like, to his good dinner.

"Oh, yes," she answered, "I dine out very often. I like it better."

He bit his lip with quick displeasure; she was merely eccentric, then, not naïve. For like every other man Roger detested eccentric women. It has always been a marvel to me that women of distinct brain capacity so almost universally fail to realise that we like you better fashionable, even, than eccentric. You do not understand why, dear ladies: you think it must be that we prefer fashion to brains, but indeed it is not so. It is because to be fashionable is for you to be normal, at least, that we tolerate your sheeplike marches and counter-marches across the plain of society.

"Where do you dine when you dine out?" he inquired coldly, to trap her at last into some explanation.

"On the rocks," she answered serenely, "or under the trees. Sometimes on the sand close to the water. I like it better than in the house."

Roger experienced a ridiculous sense of relief.

"Do you dine alone?" he asked and she answered quietly,

"Of course. My