Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/162

They did not dance long, the room was too crowded to do so with any pleasure, and they had hardly spoken at all. When he had found a comfortable and reasonably secluded place in which to sit out, Tony turned to her with a smile.

“Do you know that we have met before?” he said. She looked surprised. “I don’t think we can have; you see, I’ve only just come out.”

“Oh, it was long before that!”

She raised her brown eyebrows and stared at him, honestly bewildered. “But I never met anybody. Aunt Sophia———”

“Strictly speaking you shouldn’t have met me. It was on the Orontes, and you were running away from your governess. Do you happen to remember a sailor-boy called St. Croix?”

“Oh, were you—are you, I mean—that one? How awfully strange! Of course I do remember. But———”

She paused, a little awkwardly. She was distinctly shocked. So she was right after all—he was nobody—only a sailor from a merchant ship, whom she remembered seeing cleaning brasses—a nice sort of sailor, certainly, but he had no business at the Listers’, surely. She was a candid child still. She spoke almost without thinking.

“You’ve—got on since then, haven’t you?”

“Got on?”

Pamela flushed, but she went on bravely. “I meant, it’s so strange to meet you here, with . . . It’s all different.”

“How do I come to be associating with people of another class, in fact?” Tony laughed. “It’s—just money. I got a little, and then I had the luck to slip in.”

Pamela held her head very high. “I don’t quite know what you mean,” she said.

“Only that if you have money you can associate with anybody.”