Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/361

 writing-desk, where I can take it out and look at it at least once every year until I am an old woman—ever so much older than Aunt Mary.

When Jimmy Payne suddenly hurled himself at me out of a cab (just as Aunt Mary and I and a donkey were trailing disconsolately down from Mola) and exploded into fireworks calculated to blow my poor Lightning Conductor into fragments, I threw cold water on his Roman candles and rockets.

All the same, though, I felt as if I had been dipped first into boiling hot, then freezing cold water myself. I couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't believe any of Jimmy's sensational accusations of Brown, and I defended him whenever Jimmy would let me get in a word edgewise. But when he told me that Dad had come half across the world from New York to Sicily on the strength of his statements, I was wild—partly with anger and partly with anxiety to see my dear old Angel "immediately if not sooner."

I don't remember a word Jimmy said to me, driving down to Sir Edward Haines', where Dad had gone expecting to find me. I've just a hazy recollection of being hurried through a beautiful garden; I knew that poor Lady Brighthelmston (piteously worried about her son) and a rather common girl and her father, whom we'd stumbled across in Blois, were with us. Their cab had come behind ours. I saw Dad in the distance, talking to Brown, who looked less like a hired chauffeur than ever, and then—then came the thunderbolt.

It was almost as difficult to believe at first that he had tricked me by pretending to be Brown, when