Read Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories for Free Online Page B

perhaps. She was several years younger than himself; ten, perhaps; he was not sure.
    Miss Dilling continued to stare.
    “Well, I don’t know what to say, I’m sure,” she said at last. “The papers are wrong, of course.”
    The morning papers published a fresh Tadema sensation. Lady Chloe Staratt had been led by an apparently friendly Trumpeter reporter into an admission that her engagement to Sir Geoffrey had been broken off on the morning of his disappearance. Whereas the weeping, broken-hearted Chloe might have made a pretty enough picture to grace any suburban breakfast table, it was considerably marred by an independent statement by Mr. Gyp Rains in the same paper to the effect that his own marriage to Lady Chloe had been fixed for the morrow, this announcement being backed up by the evidence of a special licence.
    The Trumpeter, never famed for its delicacy, published the two stories one after the other and the report of the inquest in the next column. Since the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of “death by misadventure” and vetoed absolutely any question of deliberation, the combined effect of the three stories was unfortunate as far as Chloe was concerned. Tadema, reading the paper over his breakfast in the hotel lounge, was almost sorry for her.
    Most of his sympathy, however, he reserved for himself. The morning’s news had brought him no respite. He was still a dead man and to revive with honour looked like proving an impossibility.
    He was still faced with the problem of finding the means of returning to life without appearing either a petulant and jilted lover or the victim of a sudden fit of mental aberration, or, of course, both. For a time he let his mind dwell sadly on what might have been, but sighed and put the vain imaginings from him. It had happened. He was in the devil of a mess.
    He had just decided to lie low for another forty-eight hours at least until opportunity, if not sheer necessity, drove him to action, when Miss Dilling arrived. Tadema was pleased to see her, but only mildly so. By morning light she looked most of her age and her clothes were painfully provincial. However, her smile was friendly and admiring.
    She came out with her request immediately, her eyes meeting his anxiously. She hardly dared to suggest it, but Derek Fayre, her leading man, was really too ill to play and Mr. Lewis was so worried. The incognito would be preserved, of course. No one knew. She had simply spoken of him as an actor friend and that had given Mr. Lewis the idea. After all, they had done the show so many times in the past. It would be like old times. Would he? Would he? Dare she ask?
    The idea appealed to Tadema from the moment it was presented to him. It is possible, of course, that he might have smelt a rat if anyone but Chrissie Dilling had put the thing up to him. But she was so patently without second motive, so obviously anxious only to play at old times again. All women were sentimental, Tadema thought privately; all except that hussy Chloe.
    Over supper the previous evening he had asked Chrissie why she had never married. Her reply had been heart-breaking.
    “Oh, you know how it is,” she had said, wrinkling her nose at him. “First it’s a career. Afterwards there’s no one around the theatre quite good enough. And then—you just don’t.”
    Poor old Chrissie, her old-fashioned sophistication that was sophistication no more. She just hadn’t.
    Tadema smiled at her. She had a gift for making people feel pleasantly condescending.
    “My dear girl, I’m too old,” he said.
    “Geoff, don’t be ridiculous.” Her sincerity did him good.
    He went to rehearsal with her like a lamb. He had a glorious time. Every nervous criticism put in by the breathless Mr. Katz for verisimilitude’s sweet sake amused and delighted him. Things which would have rendered him speechless in his own theatre here struck him as being funny, and the old play came back easily. Right words, wrong words,