Brown on Resolution Read Free Page A

herself imagining herself rubbing her cheek against his short rebellious hair, and the mere thought turned her faint with longing as she sat in her chair, strangely maternal.
    “Well, I’m blest,” said the Commander suddenly. “Do you know, I’ve been talking to you all this time and I don’t even know what your name is?”
    “It’s Agatha,” said Agatha—that much of her name was tolerable to her, although the ‘Brown’ always rankled—“and I don’t know yours either.”
    Samarez hesitated for one regretted second; he was sure that it was unwise to tell one’s name to a strange woman, but this woman was so different.
    “It’s a very long one,” he said, “but it begins with Richard.”
    “Of course it would,” said Agatha bewilderingly, “and they call you Dickie, don’t they?”
    “They used to,” admitted Samarez, “but they mostly call me Sammy nowadays, men do.”
    “Then I shall call you Dickie,” said Agatha decidedly, and she finished her coffee as though to seal the bargain.
    So dinner was Hnished, and the room was beginning to throng with more sensible people dining at a more reasonable hour. They had no possible excuse for lingering on, and yet they both of them were most desperately unwilling to part. Their eyes met again and again across the table, and conversation died a fevered death, and neither could voice what each had most in mind. Agatha simply did not know the usual gambits leading up to the making of a new appointment; Samarez with an odd touch of sensitiveness felt that it would be banal and discordant to speak about it—this was not an ordinary woman. The restaurant was growing crowded; the waiter brought his bill unasked, and hovered round the table with the unmistakable intention of showing them that the management would prefer to see them make way for fresh comers. Fate simply forced them, with sinking hearts, to rise from the table with the words unspoken. Samarez waited for her in the foyer in a really restless and unsettled state of mind.
    And Agatha, adjusting her veil in the cloakroom, felt on the verge of tears. She had been mostly wildly unladylike; she had talked with strange men in the gilded halls of vice; it was past seven o’clock and she really must reach Ealing and the Burtons’ by nine at the latest; and she did not want to leave Dickie. Most emphatically she did not want to. But she had not the faintest idea of what she did want.
    At the door circumstances forced them further towards separation.
    “Cab, I suppose?” Said Samarez huskily.
    They climbed into a four-wheeler, and Samarez, still retaining a grain of sanity, directed the driver to Charing Cross Station. Agatha had clean forgotten the luggage left there. The cab wormed its way through the clattering traffic and turned into Chandos Street dim-lighted and quiet. Restlessly Samarez took off his hat and wiped his fretted forehead. A passing street lamp showed up his boyish face and his rumpled hair.
    “Oh,” said Agatha uncontrollably. One hand went to his shoulder, the other fumbled for his lean brown hand in the darkness. Samarez turned clumsily with his arms out to her, and all their unhappiness melted away under their wild kisses.

CHAPTER THREE
    I T WAS THE lights of the Strand and of the courtyard entrance at Charing Cross which brought them back momentarily to reality. Agatha’s face was wet with tears, her hat hung by one hatpin, as their embrace came to an end. The cab halted outside the station and a porter tore open the door.
    “I—I can’t get out,” stammered Agatha, shrinking away into a corner.
    Samarez climbed out and shut the door.
    “Wait!” he flung at the driver, and pelted into the station, dragging out the luggage receipt from his pocket as he hastened to the cloakroom with fantastic strides, blinded by the lights. By the grace of Providence there was no one there awaiting attention; it was only a matter of seconds before he came back, suitcase and kit-bag in