Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET 129
appears to have a very bitter regard indeed”—and
I related the incident of his encounter with Huebsch,
Marrot and myself.
Pelagueya read on, a very lovely figure. I sat
and smoked and watched the tamed and clipped and
much bescrubbed Cairene scene—this part of the
life Cairene that for me has no attraction, this impinge¬
ment of the shoddy Western pleasure-seeker upon
the shoddy, imitative East. Pelagueya closed the
book and searched for cigarettes, and I made haste
to offer mine—the cheap native ones I had once
found so sickly and sweet. She made a comic moue
at them, shaking her head, and then reached for one
resolutely.
“Why shouldn’t I, I suppose ? They smoke worse
things in the Warrens—when they can afford to smoke
at all. . . . Anton.”
“Princess !”
“Strange how I love you to say that. . . . But
something else. You know that Oliver left me all
his money ?”
“I did not know it was all.”
“Every piastre—though I had to go to England
to settle some things. I’m a millionaire twice over;
so they told me.”
She fell into a muse, dark head down-bent, as
she told me that. And I also mused—on the twists
of chance. The money that the elder Gault had made
as a war-time profiteer in England—his son had
passed it by with a savage sneer on his dark, twisted
face, passed it by and gone restlessly and perhaps