Out Of The Past by Patricia Wentworth Page B

unhappy?”
    “I saw you on my way down to the Trevors‘. You were in a window seat of the London train as my train came into the junction. I don’t think you saw me, but you were looking straight at me and I could see how unhappy you were. Both trains were only just moving.”
    Yes, she had been most desperately unhappy then. She was going to marry Alan not because she needed him, but because he needed her, and with every day that passed she knew most certainly that it wasn’t enough. Too late to draw back, too late to strike him such a blow, too late to do anything but go through with it as best she could.
    James waited to see whether she would speak. The pale profile bent a little, but the lips did not move. He went on.
    “I didn’t think there was anything I could do. If I had thought he would make you happy I would have made up my mind to it. But I knew he wouldn’t. Tom Trevor was right—he was going to break your heart. You see, I happened to know quite a lot about Field. He wasn’t fit to be in the same room with you, let alone marry you. I went through hell. And then—something happened.”
    She gave a little startled gasp and turned to face him, lips parted, eyes suddenly bright. That was what she had always wanted to know—what had happened, and why, and how.
    If James was surprised he did not show it. He went on speaking in the same quiet voice.
    “I had an old-standing engagement to dine with a man called Edwards and meet his wife. When I got there it was quite a party, and we all went on to rather a hot-stuff night club. It wasn’t much in my line and I wasn’t in the mood for it, but I couldn’t very well fall out. When we’d been there about half an hour Field turned up with a fairly noisy party. They had all been drinking, and they kept on. After Field had slipped and brought his partner down he stopped trying to dance and took to talking instead.”
    This was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. If there was any way out of telling her he would have taken it. There wasn’t any way. It would hurt her damnably, and he had got to do it.
    She lifted her eyes to his face and said, “Go on.”
    “He talked—about how he had never had any luck. You can’t get anywhere without money, and he had never had any. It didn’t give you a chance. And now the best he could do was to tie himself up for a beggarly few hundreds a year. I’m not going to tell you everything he said, but it was all along those lines. I went over and sat down at his table. The girl who was with him was practically out. I said, ‘You’re getting married in a day or two, aren’t you?’ And he said yes, worse luck, but you’d got to live hadn’t you, and he was down on his uppers. I said, ‘If someone were to offer you a good round sum down and a fresh start in, say, South America, what would you say about it?’ He wanted to know what I meant by a good round sum, and I told him. It seemed to sober him up. He stared at me and said, ‘You’re joking!’ I said, ‘Look here, you’re drunk. I can’t do business with you like this. If you’ll come home with me and put your head in a bucket of water, we can talk.’ ”
    Carmona said nothing. She kept her eyes on his face and said nothing.
    James went on.
    “Well, that was how it was. He knew what he was doing all right. I fed him black coffee, and he wasn’t drunk when he made the bargain. England was getting a bit too hot for him, and he had quite a fancy for South America. And he was quite frank about the money—said yours wasn’t going to be very much good to him because it was all tied up on you and your children, whereas if he had some capital to play with, there were no end of things he could do. I saw him again next day and we fixed up the details. He was to have his passage and some spending money, and the main sum down when he reached Rio. And he wasn’t to see you. He was to write and tell you the truth—that he wasn’t within a hundred miles