|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 28
The girl lowered her head again. "He paid me a lot of attention,"
she finally confessed.
"This meeting at Lady Vail's, then, was the first of many?"
"Oh, no--not of many! I saw him two or three times. But he began
to send me most extravagant presents. I suppose it was his
Oriental way of paying a compliment, but Dad objected."
"Of course he would. He knew his Orient and his Oriental. I
assume, Miss Abingdon, that you were in England during the years
that your father lived in the East?"
"Yes. I was at school. I have never been in the East."
Paul Harley hesitated. He found himself upon dangerously delicate
ground and was temporarily at a loss as to how to proceed.
Unexpected aid came from the taciturn Doctor McMurdoch.
"He never breathed a word of this to me, Phil," he said,
gloomily. "The impudence of the man! Small wonder Abingdon
objected."
Phil Abingdon tilted her chin forward rebelliously.
"Ormuz Khan was merely unfamiliar with English customs," she
retorted. "There was nothing otherwise in his behaviour to which
any one could have taken exception."
"What's that!" demanded the physician. "If a man of colour paid
his heathen attentions to my daughter--"
"But you have no daughter, Doctor."
"No. But if I had--"
"If you had," echoed Phil Abingdon, and was about to carry on
this wordy warfare which, Harley divined, was of old standing
between the two, when sudden realization of the purpose of the
visit came to her. She paused, and he saw her biting her lips
desperately. Almost at random he began to speak again.
"So far as you are aware, then, Miss Abingdon, Sir Charles never
met Ormuz Khan?"
"He never even saw him, Mr. Harley, that I know of."
"It is most extraordinary that he should have given me the
impression that this man--for I can only suppose that he referred
to Ormuz Khan--was in some way associated with his fears."
"I must remind you, Mr. Harley," Doctor McMurdoch interrupted,
"that poor Abingdon was a free talker. His pride, I take it,
which was strong, had kept him silent on this matter with me, but
he welcomed an opportunity of easing his mind to one discreet and
outside the family circle. His words to you may have had no
bearing upon the thing he wished to consult you about."
"H'm," mused Harley. "That's possible. But such was not my
impression."
He turned again to Phil Abingdon. "This Ormuz Khan, I understood
you to say, actually resides in or near London?"
"He is at present living at the Savoy, I believe. He also has a
house somewhere outside London."
There were a hundred other questions Paul Harley was anxious to
ask: some that were professional but more that were personal. He
found himself resenting the intrusion of this wealthy Oriental
into the life of the girl who sat there before him. And because
he could read a kindred resentment in the gloomy eye of Doctor
McMurdoch, he was drawn spiritually closer to that dour
character.
By virtue of his training he was a keen psychologist, and he
perceived clearly enough that Phil Abingdon was one of those
women in whom a certain latent perversity is fanned to life by
opposition. Whether she was really attracted by Ormuz Khan or
whether she suffered his attentions merely because she knew them
to be distasteful to others, he could not yet decide.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|