style="font-size:15px;"> ‘It’s all right,’ said Hamlyn meekly. ‘I’m awfully happy to give you a dinner anyhow, Miss Beatrice.’
Now I had nothing to say on this subject, but I thought I would just make this remark:
‘Miss Hipgrave,’ said I, ‘is very fond of a dinner.’
Beatrice laughed. She understood my little correction.
‘He doesn’t know any better, do you?’ said she pleasantly to Hamlyn. ‘We shall civilise him in time, though; then I believe he’ll be nicer than you, Charley, I really do. You’re – ’
‘I shall be uncivilised by then,’ said I.
‘Oh, that wretched island!’ cried Beatrice. ‘You’re really going?’
‘Most undoubtedly. By the way, Hamlyn, who’s your friend?’
Surely this was an innocent enough question, but little Hamlyn went red from the edge of his clipped whisker on the right to the edge of his mathematically equal whisker on the left.
‘Friend!’ said he in an angry tone; ‘he’s not a friend of mine. I only met him on the Riviera.’
‘That,’ I admitted, ‘does not, happily, in itself constitute a friendship.’
‘And he won a hundred louis of me in the train between Cannes and Monte Carlo.’
‘Not bad going that,’ observed Denny in an approving tone.
‘Is he then un grec?’ asked Mrs Hipgrave, who loves a scrap of French.
‘In both senses, I believe,’ answered Hamlyn viciously.
‘And what’s his name?’ said I.
‘Really I don’t recollect,’ said Hamlyn rather petulantly.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ observed Beatrice, attacking her oysters which had now made their appearance.
‘My dear Beatrice,’ I remonstrated, ‘you’re the most charming creature in the world, but not the only one. You mean that it doesn’t matter to you.’
‘Oh, don’t be tiresome. It doesn’t matter to you either, you know. Do go away and leave me to dine in peace.’
‘Half a minute!’ said Hamlyn. ‘I thought I’d got it just now, but it’s gone again. Look here, though, I believe it’s one of those long things that end in poulos.’
‘Oh, it ends in poulos, does it?’ said I in a meditative tone.
‘My dear Charley,’ said Beatrice, ‘I shall end in Bedlam if you’re so very tedious. What in the world I shall do when I’m married, I don’t know.’
‘My dearest!’ said Mrs Hipgrave, and a stage direction might add, Business with brows as before.
‘Poulos,’ I repeated thoughtfully.
‘Could it be Constantinopoulos?’ asked Hamlyn, with a nervous deference to my Hellenic learning.
‘It might conceivably,’ I hazarded, ‘be Constantine Stefanopoulos.’
‘Then,’ said Hamlyn, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it was. Anyhow, the less you see of him, Wheatley, the better. Take my word for that.’
‘But,’ I objected – and I must admit that I have a habit of assuming that everybody follows my train of thought – ‘it’s such a small place, that, if he goes, I shall be almost bound to meet him.’
‘What’s such a small place?’ cried Beatrice with emphasised despair.
‘Why, Neopalia, of course,’ said I.
‘Why should anybody, except you, be so insane as to go there?’ she asked.
‘If he’s the man I think, he comes from there,’ I explained, as I rose for the last time; for I had been getting up to go and sitting down again several times.
‘Then he’ll think twice before he goes back,’ pronounced Beatrice decisively; she was irreconcilable about my poor island.
Denny and I walked off together; as we went he observed:
‘I suppose that chap’s got no end of money?’
‘Stefan – ?’ I began.
‘No, no. Hang it, you’re as bad as Miss Hipgrave says. I mean Bennett Hamlyn.’
‘Oh, yes, absolutely no end to it, I believe.’
Denny looked sagacious.
‘He’s very free with his dinners,’ he observed.
‘Don’t let’s worry about it,’ I suggested, taking his arm. I was not worried about it myself. Indeed for the moment my island monopolised my mind, and my attachment to Beatrice was not of such a romantic character as to make me ready to be jealous on slight grounds. Mrs Hipgrave said the engagement was based on ‘general suitability.’ Now it is difficult to be very passionate over that.
‘If you don’t mind, I don’t,’ said Denny reasonably.
‘That’s right. It’s only a little way Beatrice – ’ I stopped abruptly. We were now on the steps outside the restaurant, and I had just perceived a scrap of paper lying on the mosaic pavement. I stooped down and picked it up. It proved to be a fragment torn from the menu card. I turned it over.
‘Hullo, what’s this?’ said I, searching for my eye-glass, which was (as usual) somewhere in the small of my back.
Denny gave me the glass, and I read what was written on the back. It was in Greek, and it ran thus:
‘By way of Rhodes – small yacht there – arrive seventh.’
I turned the piece of paper over in my hand. I drew a conclusion or two; one was that my tall neighbour was named Stefanopoulos; another that he had made good use of his ears – better than I had made of mine; for a third, I guessed that he would go to Neopalia; for a fourth, I fancied that Neopalia was the place to which the lady had declared she would accompany him. Then I fell to wondering why all these things should be so, why he wished to remember the route of my journey, the date of my arrival, and the fact that I meant to hire a yacht. Finally, those two chance encounters, taken with the rest, assumed a more interesting complexion.
‘When you’ve done with that bit of paper,’ observed Denny, in a tone expressive of exaggerated patience, ‘we might as well go on, old fellow.’
‘All right. I’ve done with it – for the present,’ said I. But I took the liberty of slipping Mr Constantine Stefanopoulos’s memorandum into my pocket.
The general result of the evening was to increase most distinctly my interest in Neopalia. I went to bed still thinking of my purchase, and I recollect that the last thing which came into my head before I went to sleep was, ‘What did she mean by pointing to the ring?’
Well, I found an answer to that later on.
CHAPTER
