And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew's
house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a
minute, Rue Carew's hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naïa,
who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.
And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of
"moving accidents by flood and field," aware of the girl's deep,
breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more
inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to
talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl's clear
eyes.
But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he
was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there
was no getting away from what happened to himself.
So he made the melodrama a comedy, and the moments of deadly peril he
treated lightly. And one thing he avoided altogether, and that was
how he had kissed Ilse Dumont.
When he finished his account of his dreadful situation in the
stateroom of Ilse Dumont, and how at the last second her unerring
shots had shattered the bomb clock, cut the guy-rope, and smashed the
water-jug which deluged the burning fuses, he added with a very
genuine laugh: "If only some photographer had taken a few hundred feet of film for me
I could retire on an income in a year and never do another stroke of
honest work!"
The Princess smiled, mechanically, but Rue Carew dropped her white
face on the Princess Naïa's shoulder as though suddenly fatigued.