Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/23

Rh She stood with a hunted look on her face and looking far away.

"I hope they won't stay more than the week," she said.

"Why not?"

She rubbed her hands together as if washing them, her eyes still looking far beyond me.

"I don't like that man. The woman's right enough. But that man doesn't like me?"

She was always full of the most unaccountable fears.

I stopped my laugh suddenly and looked at her, puzzled, but said no more.

It was a week of mystery, the one that passed in my rooms.

Naomi had her own room and was most independent in her ideas of using only her own little Primus and tried to burn candles until I insisted on lighting her gas.

There was a little woman named Helen Morton living next door.

One day as Naomi and I were going out together this little woman was standing on her step. She had often been in after a wandering fowl.

"Oh, you've got a chum," she said to me as if she envied me a precious possession. "I had once when my sister was here."

She said it with a smile that looked so sad that I vowed to draw her into our companionship.

So we used to ask her in in the evening.

"If you don't talk 'Occultism,'" she said, "no spirits for me except the Johnny Walker ones. I have a ginger-beer allowance and a champagne appetite. But no dreams and superstitions or occult talks or I wontwon't [sic] come."

We promised, laughing.

But in spite of disliking occultism Miss Smith liked to discuss the occultists.

She didn't like their hats. She could not understand their life. She brought up an old scandal about one of the members.

Naomi joined in.

"Oh, let the past go," I said, "why shouldn't hethe [sic] poor man be allowed to forget it. It's a horrible way society has of never letting people up once they're down. Why not. At sunrise every soul is born again?"

A curiously quick flush spread over Naomi's face, and she ducked her head. I thought of it afterwards—that flush—I wondered at it then.

We went on to talk of many things and I described a christening party to which my sister and I had once been asked when we were just out of our 'teens, and our horror at finding a room full of people who were drinking and