Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/217

 Three days ago—and Lanice heard no more. Three days ago—and the rain pelting down through the soot and leaking through the arched roof of the dingy London station where, amid porters and boxes and luggage and tired travellers and patient guards, Sears Ripley had met her as she came up on the boat train. Perhaps if she had turned her head she might instead have seen Anthony. Perhaps he saw her—and chose to walk away. Perhaps their shoulders touched in the crowd and neither knew, and he would go his way to Bagdad and she hers back to Boston. Sears had taken her to a respectable and very female boarding-house which he had considered 'quite safe' for her, and after a dilatory conversation about the Continent had left her. But Anthony—if he had snapped his fingers she would have gone with him to the ends of the earth. She resented unreasonably the kind and friendly man who instead had met her. Clapyard was saying, 'I imagine that he is sailing within the month.' The little cousin was staring at her with stiff, uncompromising eyes. Lanice felt no jealousy towards the English girl. The lump of amber, clumsily shaped, was not the trifle Anthony Jones would select for any one who really amused and pleased him. It had been on the top of his trunk ('box,' he would say) and he was tired of it—and he felt he had to give the girl something, or he may have gone out and bought it; perhaps he had said, 'I'll take that—if it's not more than nine shillings.' And he knew she was just the girl to tie it on with a red ribbon, and to tie it too tight. She looked patron-