“And now I’m to be starved instead?”

Then she collected her muff and gloves, closed her coat, pinning the violets outside, thanked him for a nice lunch and left him.  He paid the bill in a hurry and hastened after her, catching up with her upon the kerb.

“Well,” he said in her ear, “I shall keep on asking.  What do you think?”

She signalled a passing omnibus to stop and boarding it left him with a smile and wave of the hand.  For a few seconds, he stood on the kerb, at grips with a feeling of humiliation and defeat, then he began to walk back to his work.  He was not yet accustomed to the setting of this new act he was playing with his wife—­he thought of it thus—­though it was making him smart badly.  As he went forward, threading his way among the hurrying after-lunch throngs, he was thinking hard.  He attracted some attention from women’s eyes as he swung along, oblivious, big, straight-shouldered and masculine.  All the afternoon, while his mind was ostensibly upon his business, he fumed and fretted.

In taking up his job in London, he found a good deal to do and to book that first day.  He had to pay rushing visits to two agents, talk over his tour with the head of the firm, and drive about the Park, in a Runaway, a rich undecided peer who couldn’t make up his mind to buy her.  But he bought the car de luxe before they parted, and his cheque lay in Osborn’s pocket.

Another twenty-pounds commission, and what for?  To spend on a woman who coolly didn’t want it.  Osborn Kerr started for home, chafing sorely.

On his way to the Piccadilly Tube he passed the Piccadilly Theatre.  Outside the doors hung a big frame of photographs of the entire cast of Sautree’s new production, and he paused to look, absent-minded as he was, with male interest in that galaxy of charm.  In the second row of faces he met Roselle’s.  She photographed well, her big, smooth shoulders bare, her hair smooth and smart, her chin uptilted so that she looked out, foreshortened.  She smiled inscrutably.  He knew the smile well, although he had never translated it so far as to guess that it covered stupidity in a sphinx’s mask that baffled and piqued.  That smile was of sterling value to Roselle; it was like so many pounds paid regularly into her pocket; it set men wondering what her meaning was when all the while she meant nothing.  As Osborn Kerr paused before the rows of portraits, he wondered, a little yet, what Roselle meant when, so inscrutably, she smiled.

She was beautiful, there was no doubt of it.  He remembered with some self-gratulation those hours spent with her in the blue Runaway with its silver fittings; Roselle in her fur coat and the purple velvet hat crushed close, in a cheeky fashion, over her night-black hair; and people turning to look at them both.  He had seen in men’s faces as they passed that they thought him a lucky fellow.  They would have liked to be in his shoes, or rather, in his seat beside her, in the Runaway.