Flames Coming out of the Top Read Online Free PDF Page B

firm. She reminded him that he had to be up early in the morning. But she shook hands with him very nicely, and told him to take care of himself. She appeared to have forgiven the incident of the ring.
    Dunnett said good-bye to Kay downstairs in the long narrow hall. She was crying. In the darkness she clung to him. She began to shiver because the dress she was wearing was thin and because everything inside her had grown suddenly cold. “Don’t go,” she said almost in a whisper. “Don’t go and I’ll marry you at once.”
    But he reached up and disentangled the arms which were holding him: she was offering him something that he could not accept. “I’ll soon be back,” he promised. “You’re everything in the world to me, my darling.”
    With that he kissed her for the last time and was gone. He pulled the front door to after him and left Kay standing there in the darkness alone. He was surprised to find that he was nearly crying, himself. Why did women have to make difficult things so much more difficult? It was a way they had of torturing themselves and other people. But five months was nothing. It would pass in a succession of crowded, arduous days. It would seem like to-morrow, or at most the day after, when he would be back again, ringing the Bartons’ front door bell for Kay to come down to him. But no; she would be waiting for him on the platform.
    The thought stirred and braced him; as he turned the corner of Fairfax Gardens he was whistling.
    Next morning there was no time for remorse. The taxi that was to take him to the station was waiting at the door at seven-fifteen. He saw his two trunks and the suitcase go down the stairs with an air of purposeful finality. Therecould be no backing out of it now, and he stood alone in the small front room ready for anything that the other side of the world might have to offer. With a sudden feeling of irritation he remembered Mr. Verking’s revolver which still lay in the dressing-table drawer. He had hesitated too long. There was nothing for it but to take the absurd weapon with him and drop it overboard on the way. He picked it up and packed it gingerly into his private attaché case. It lay there beside the confidential papers of Govern and Fryze and the studio portrait of Kay which she had given him for his birthday. Then, shutting the door after him, he went down and said good-bye to his landlady. In many ways she was sorry to lose him; he was the ideal single gentleman. But at that moment she gloated over him: he was her little bit of sensation, someone to whom something exciting had actually happened.
    Just as the taxi was leaving, Dunnett leant forward and changed the directions. He told the driver to take him down Alexandra Terrace for, at that moment, he cherished the idiotic belief that Kay might, by some miracle of understanding, be waiting at the window to see him go by. But the blinds were still down and Kay was sleeping. The street looked grey and empty in the cold September dawn, and only milkmen and paper-boys were about. There was no one at all to see him off as he set out for El Dorado by way of Cannon Street.

Chapter III
    The Ship that he was now in was very different from the
Isabella Flores
. The liner herself had not been large. She had not been new or fast or particularly comfortable; her passengers were carried as a scarcely paying complement to the cargo, and they were housed accordingly. But in the eyes of Mr. Govern, who had arranged the passage, she had one outstanding virtue: she transported a man from Tilbury to the Pacific at a cut-rate for ocean travel. And compared with the
Viña del Mar
she was a ship built on the noble scale, a ten-thousand-ton palace fit for princes.
    The
Isabella Flores
had come no further than Guayaquil. Dunnett had looked back with an envious longing from the
cubierta
of the
Viña del Mar
, which was carrying him down to Amricante, to where the
Flores
was