“After this for hours Aubrey could hardly find a chance to say ‘Now I must go’: if he did, it was at once drowned in talk, and he passed a merry night, which was only marred by one awkward moment, when, during another absence of Laura, Sir Phipps hurriedly drew a check, and held it out to Aubrey.
“ ‘My good sir!’ Aubrey breathed with shy eyelids.
“ ‘Tush!’ Six Phipps said, ‘you are only a boy, and I an old fellow whose life you have saved — your birthday, too.’
“ ‘Yes, sir,’ — from Aubrey, with a breath of laughter, ‘but really — I am only sorry that these things can’t be done.’
“ ‘Oh, well, we won’t quarrel over it’ — Sir Phipps tore the check in shreds.
“Aubrey could hear Big Ben striking three, as he stepped out into streets now powdery with snow, over which a late and waning moon had moved up, revealing him to Laura, who at a window peered after him till he disappeared. Laura at that window then clasped her hands behind her neck, and stretched, and then, alone in the room, lay sideways on a sofa, and mused. What a tall, rough-clad fellow! she thought; his dash of dark mustache did not cover his rich lips; he had a modest way of lowering his eyelids, which was both shy and disdainful; he threw out odd breaths of laughter: and under the eyelids, eyes all beauty, like the Moonlight Sonata, drowsy, brown, brown. She turned, and stretched, murmuring, ‘Yes, charming,’ with half a yawn, and half a laugh, and said ‘Ah!’
“Aubrey, for his part, on getting home, sat up yet an hour smoking cigarettes, thinking it out, and soon came to the conclusion that he would go no more to the O’Donagues. Laura was a remarkable creature, he thought! So lively, vital — and pretty; even the loss of her voice somehow added to her: just as she was, she was — she, was ‘just so’ His brain kept comparing Laura with Hylda: Hylda was little, Laura big; Hylda was fair, with a broad face, dimples in her smile, bright eyes that laughed; Laura was dark, and had gaudy eyes. Which was the prettier — Laura or Hylda? Certainly, Laura was as far prettier than Hylda as La Rosa was more lovely than Laura. But Hylda was good, born good to the heart — was Laura good? Laura was glitter, Hylda was gold; if Laura was a genius, Hylda was an angel. ‘Well, the birthday has come, and the birthday has gone,’ he murmured at last; and tossing off the mourning clothes, he turned in to bed.
“The next day at luncheon in their usual Piccadilly tea shop, on his relating the adventure to Hylda, she overwhelmed him with questions as to Laura — Laura’s looks, Laura’s throat-whisper, Laura’s touch, and was she really so very clever? ‘And are you expected to go back?’ — her eyes fastened on his face, for wherever she was with him, she could not help it, she could see nothing but him alone; she hung only upon him, her soul dancing in her gladdened glances: ‘did they seem really to want you again?’
“ ‘I think so,’ Aubrey answered; ‘but I’m not going, all the same.’
“ ‘Why not?’
“ ‘Hard to say quite why.’ His eyes dropped from her face.
“But Aubrey was not to escape the baronet so easily, for only a week later that Rolls car which he had saved from a shock drew up before his block of flats, the O’Donague mounted many stairs to him, and, glancing round Aubrey’s cheap but chaste interior, remarked: ‘Now, this is a charming den I find you in!’ while Aubrey stood all shy eyes at the honor, and brought forth liqueurs. The fact was, that the old baronet had an absolute need of someone new to whom to give peeps of Salvadora Rosa’s photograph and make a confidant of, and his fancy had fixed upon Aubrey: so that within a month or two now, Aubrey, without having ever set eyes on her, knew La Rosa by rote. She turned out to be a lady with something of a European fame, Spanish by birth, divorced wife of a Polish Count; and what mainly made her notorious, apart from some duels and suicides which had been due to her; was the fact that she had a little daughter whom her ex-husband had for years been seeking to sneak from her: for this child, on attaining her eighteenth year, would be as rich as Croesus: so Salvadora Rosa, who seemed to have a keen sense of the good of money, stuck to the child, though its father was its lawful guardian. At that moment, Sir Phipps told Aubrey, though scores of secret emissaries in several countries were intriguing to get at the child, probably no soul but Salvadora Rosa and her own agents had any notion where the child was.
“ ‘Must be a clever sort of lady,’ Aubrey remarked.
“ ‘Clever as ten monkeys!’ Sir Phipps cried out.
“ ‘Rich?’
“ ‘She is like a bank or the Severn — sometimes full, sometimes empty,’ Sir Phipps O’Dowdy O’Donague answered: ‘it comes and it goes, like a maid’s flushes and the monthly moon. At present, it strikes me, she is rather hard up — embarrasée, her little tongue calls it, with a roll on the r.’
“ ‘Take care she doesn’t get what she wants from you, sir.’
“ ‘My dear fellow, you are talking of a lady.’
“ ‘I beg pardon,’ Aubrey said.
“But he seemed destined to have to hear of La Rosa: although he did not go to Brook Street (save once to a crush-reception, when he got only glimpses of Miss O’Donague) Brook Street came to him. One day, looking out of the window, down there in the street he saw a gig roll slowly past, the reins in a lady’s hand, and the lady was Laura O’Donague. He watched with interest to see if she glanced up at his windows, but she did not. However, one day some three months later he opened his door to a rap, and there, to his amazement, was the busy breath of Laura, whispering: ‘I have to talk to you about Papa. It is serious.’
“It was all about La Rosa and her Papa that she had come!
“ ‘You have a lot of influence over Papa, let me tell you,’ she said, seated within the nook made by the half-round seat that surrounded Aubrey’s fireplace: ‘he never so took to anyone as to you; and you have to speak to him.’
“Aubrey began to say: ‘I’m rather afraid—’
“But she said: ‘No, really, you don’t know how serious it is: he is getting more and more entangled with this lady, and three days ago, just after getting home from her place, had a most strange illness...’
“ ‘Oh, I say, Miss O’Donague!’
“ ‘You have no idea of this woman,’ Laura said — ‘she sticks at nothing. I have never seen her, but one night last week, at the Mansion House, Detective-Sergeant Barker — ever heard of Barker? — impressed upon me that she’s most dangerous, said that the woman’s hungers are like a tiger’s, and it is only because she is so much deeper than the European police that she can continue her career.’
“Aubrey, with puckered brows, sat at a loss what to say, but in the end promised to use his ‘influence with poor Papa,’ and after an hour’s windstorm of whispering, Miss O’Donague at last accused herself of being unconventional in coming alone, and left him.
“Two months later, in July, he spent a weekend with the O’Donagues at Clanning, their seat in Gloucestershire, and then, as they went to Italy, saw them no more for some months.
“It was autumn when the O’Donagues returned to England, passed a fortnight in Gloucestershire, and then were in London once more, La Rosa having also been abroad at the same time; and shortly after she was back, they were back.
“Aubrey was at work one afternoon in November on a Kermesse, when the O’Donague anew came breezily in.
“ ‘I am now straight from Regent’s Park [Regent’s Park meant Salvadora Rosa]; got back from Italy three weeks ago, then went down to Clanning — beastly unpleasant thing happened down there — give me a glass of liqueur: I don’t feel well today, boy.’