The Second Shot Read Free Page B

though his English had no sign of an accent the French in him decidedly predominated, both in appearance and characteristics. Personally I have never cared for the French. He was half-a-head shorter than his wife, and followed her about like a pet poodle. Sexual attraction is a very odd thing. Whenever I think of Paul de Ravel I thank Heaven that I have escaped it.
    The leader of the howls had been Armorel Scott-Davies, Eric’s cousin and almost sister and a most offensive young woman. It had always seemed to me that she comprised in her person every single thing that the newspapers have to say about the modern girl.
    Out of the whole roomful in fact there was, besides Ethel, only one person whom I was really glad to see. This was a young girl whose name, I remembered, was Elsa Verity, a charmingly pretty little thing with soft fair hair and shy blue eyes. I had met her for a short time in London the previous winter, also under Ethel’s auspices. She was, indeed, I had gathered, rather a protégée of Ethel’s, and I seemed to recall vaguely some story of her being exceedingly rich and an orphan, and something about Ethel’s fears of her falling prey to some fortune hunter. I adjusted my pince-nez and smiled at her, and she smiled back with delicious confusion. A more pleasing contrast to the unpleasant Armorel, with her cropped black hair and her foolish aping of the masculine in her clothes, it would have been hard to find.
    John Hillyard was talking to Sylvia de Ravel about his turkeys, or some equally uninteresting birds, and I am sure the conversation was boring her as much as it would have me in her place. John has always puzzled me a little; he is, in fact, one of the very few people who do, for I must confess that I have not found it necessary to make a study of my fellow creatures in order to see through most of them as plainly as if they had been made of plate glass; the average human being is wearisomely transparent. John, however, must be slightly more opaque. He looks the typical farmer; his heart is in farming, and farming only; he seldom talks anything but farming, or the scientific slaughter of wild creatures; one would imagine he never thought of anything else. Yet, unable like any other typical farmer to make farming pay, he has turned what should have been his profession into a hobby and makes his living – and a very comfortable living, I understand, too – by writing, of all things, detective stories. And Ethel tells me that he enjoys very large sales, particularly in America. Perhaps I had John in mind when I hinted above that my own intelligence would hardly be inadequate for a similar task; for certainly if John Hillyard can write them successfully, then one would say that anybody can.
    Such, then, was the company gathered in Ethel Hillyards’s Devonshire sitting room that afternoon; and it was not until I was halfway through my second cup of tea that I realized, with quite a start, what a very strangely assorted company it was. Scandal has never held the faintest interest for me, I am glad to say, so that the secret history of my companions of the moment is always the last thing to enter my mind.
    In the case of Eric Scott-Davies, however, scandal is far too inflated to remain secret; and though one hears, in the circles in which he moves, a new and disgraceful story about him almost every day, one such story had been so persistent a little time ago as to force itself into permanent lodgment even in my mind. For the last year Eric’s name had been coupled unceasingly with that of Sylvia de Ravel, until it was openly said that the whole world knew of the affair except only De Ravel himself. Nor did it need anybody else’s knowledge of De Ravel to inform me that when at last that deluded man did hear of it, something violent would happen. And here Ethel, with sublime tactlessness, had asked the trio to share the same roof for the next fortnight!
    No wonder I was unable to repress a slight start.