Page:Guy Boothby - The Beautiful White Devil.djvu/150

 when she saw that it was useless my cudgelling my brains any more, gave another little silvery laugh, and said—

"Do you remember, just three years ago, being called in to the Langham Hotel to attend a young American lady who had a fish-bone stuck in her throat?"

"I remember the circumstance perfectly," I answered, but that young lady was only one or two and twenty."

"You think then I look older than that? Well! I reckon you are really not very complimentary. But you must remember that that was three years ago, and I was only a girl then. When once we get grown up, and past a certain point, over on our side, we age pretty fast. That's so, I reckon. Well now you know me, don't you? What a day that was, to be sure, wasn't it? Lor! how pap and mammie did go on! Anybody'd have thought I was going to Kingdom Come right away to have heard them. D'you know, I reckon I must have got the marks of that bone in my throat to this day."

"It was a very nasty scratch, if I remember rightly," I answered, glad to have at last discovered who this talkative creature was, and where I had seen her face before.

"Are you remaining very long in Java, Mrs. Beecher?" I asked the elder lady, feeling that so far she had been rather neglected.

"No, I think not," she answered thoughtfully; "we are trying to make up our minds whether to take a British India steamer home from here, or to go up to Singapore and intercept a Peninsular and Oriental there. Miss Sanderson has taken a great fancy to the East, and I must confess I am very loth to leave it."

"You are quite right," I said. "I can fully sympathise