Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/217

 an end unless she found an Alf or a 'Arry, and that, she told herself, was difficult with Mr. Blundon on one side and Mr. Winnery on the other taking up all her time. Mr. Winnery might have been an aid but he, like Mr. Blundon, showed no interest in lovemaking, that is, if you discounted an occasional furtive pinch or shady joke. There seemed to be no way out but to bid old Mr. Winnery a sorrowful farewell and conduct Mr. Blundon, whose health seemed much improved, back to Bayswater where she knew her ground.

The next morning while she and Mr. Winnery were drinking together she told him that her visit was at an end, and old Mr. Winnery very nearly caused her to faint by asking her to marry him. She did not accept at once for she had, of course, to consider Mr. Blundon. She could not turn him out abruptly into the world to fall back into poverty and drunkenness. Besides, she would miss him. He would leave a hole in her life. So she told Mr. Winnery the whole story, out and out, even to the fact that although they had long shared a room there was nothing between them. She gave it as her opinion that Mr. Blundon was too sickly to be interested in such things. She told the story regretfully, feeling that she was driving the last nail into the coffin of her adventure with Mr. Winnery.

But Mr. Winnery proved himself a gentleman in every sense of the word. He believed the story, he told her, moved perhaps by the certainty that Bessie was too guileless to have invented such a tale. Her generosity, he said, made him care for her all the more deeply. As to Mr. Blundon, he could go on in