Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/26

26 She looked frightened, I don't know why. My work took me out all day. I left her in the morning and had a feeling, somehow, when I came back late in the afternoon, that someone had been in my rooms.

It was nothing, of course, Naomi having received her friends there, but I picked up the little skit book from the sofa, sorry that I had left it lying about, and hoped the Priestess had not seen it. These occultists can be very nasty to one another at times, and are as revengeful as schoolgirls if their vanity is hurt.

She seemed nervous and as if she did not feel happy at meeting me. I supposed she had not forgiven me for having even suggested that I felt like quarreling.

"I'm terribly quarrelsome," I said once, laughing.

"So am I," she said, and she might have added, "and I never forgive." When we had quarrelled I remembered some stories she had told me of other women she had quarrelled with and had never forgiven. I should have taken warning but my temper is quick and soon over and somehow I expect the same of other people.

But the night of the concert saw me go out leaving Naomi in anything but a friendly mood, for we had had our tiff over a trifling thing and she had already launched out on her road of unrelenting revenge.

I came home humming the beautiful Andante of one of Beethoven's Symphonies, refreshed and exalted.

Naomi, to my great relief, was almost her friendly self again.

"Guess who has been here?" she said, "Tom Felton drove up in a motor. He brought a Mrs. Roberts with him, dear. He found out my address from the Coxes."

"Oh, Naomi! And the place was like a bear-garden."

For the minute I suppose I sounded annoyed. My annoyance was only at the dust and untidiness I saw as I looked round. Naomi and I did not mind carelessness but I did not like the thought of strangers seeing it.

"It didn't matter. He wouldn't mind. I don't know where Diana can have gone to. I can't hear her stirring in her room. She must have gone away, I think."

"I'm glad you saw him, Naomi. You must ask him to come again."

We had almost come to friendly relations again.

And then another tiff came. I said something that annoyed her. I saw I had done it, and that I seemed to be judging her for something she had told me of her past.

Her face hardened and she seemed relieved to think she was going back to her own flat.

Looking back on it now I believe it was her fear of the White Priestess and her Occult School of high thinking, and objecting to individual attentions after her visit from