The Shocking Miss Anstey Read Online Free PDF Page A

his hat in answer, and he saw her turn away. Then he felt utterly alone. She was driving away, and she would not come back. It was not to be expected, whatever she had said. She was driving with Hildersham, who had rank and title and thirty thousand a year, and she was not likely to forget it. He had better do the forgetting himself. Yet he could not forget her, and perhaps he never would. He had been too long at sea, fifteen years of it with scarcely a sight of a woman, and perhaps it was hard that the first to look into his eyes should be this one. She had been friendly too, and the deep yearnings of years were rousing in him. Perhaps she had known how to rouse them, but she was going with Hildersham, and the world seemed grey and lonely.
    He went through the Park gate, and just for a moment he looked back, looked at the distant crowd, the horsemen and the gigs and phaetons, the elegant lookers-on. They all seemed very free from care, all intent upon themselves, but it might be different soon. The war was over but the aftermath was not, and no one knew what the post-war world would be--except that it would be different, and already there were tales of falling prices, of unemployment, of manufacturers in ruin as contracts ended. Even the terms of peace were not yet known. Wellington was in Paris discussing those, surrounded by a cloud of pleasure-seekers, and Hildersham would be among them soon; and somewhere in the tropics a ship was sailing south, endlessly in the ocean silence. She would be across the Line by now, close-hauled in the southeast trades, and he wondered how long she would take on passage. Four thousand miles to St. Helena, and Northumberland had no turn of speed.
    He shook himself, telling himself he was turning silly and had better get a grasp on things. The afternoon was ending, and it was time for dinner. But something else had ended too,
    and all he had left was the petals of a rose, pressed between the leaves of his prayer book--and that was silly too. But he could not help it. She had been a dream of what he had never known; and less and less did he know what he now should do.
     
     

3 The Man from Yesterday
     
    He was in this questing and dissatisfied mood when he turned into Larkin’s chophouse, next to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, in search of a quiet dinner. It was a house he was beginning to like, of good standing but not of the haut ton, so that he was not troubled by airs and graces, and usually there was plenty of room. But the incident in the Park had made him late. It was now six o’clock, the fashionable hour for dinner in this London after the war, and he could not see an empty table anywhere. Then the head waiter bowed him to a table under a window, where a man was sitting alone, and for a moment Grant hesitated. The table was laid for two, but he was not sure that he had a right to intrude upon a stranger, or even that he wanted to. Then the man looked up while he waited for his dinner, and he had obviously understood the situation. He waved courteously to the vacant chair, and he seemed on the point of speaking when his lean sun-tanned face became suddenly sharp. A little furrow came to his forehead, as if he were trying to recall something, and then he came quickly to his feet.
    ‘Haven’t we met, sir?’ He spoke in a clear pleasant voice. ‘I’m sure we have.’
    ‘I don’t remember it.’ Grant spoke more slowly, and there was doubt in his tone. ‘It’s possible, of course. Were you in the war?’
    ‘Peninsula. And you?’
    ‘Well--offshore, if you like.’ A half-memory was stirring now, and a thought that he had indeed seen this man before. ‘My name’s Grant, and I’ve the honour to be a captain in the Navy.’
    ‘Grant?’ The man echoed it, and then his hand slapped suddenly on the table. ‘Of course. You were in--what was the name?-- Altair. God, how she rolled!’
    ‘Now where---’
    ‘You took us from Oporto--a half-company of infantry-- and you