Halfway down Regent Street the engine started to miss and sputter; finally it stopped. In her hurried start she had not looked at the gauge: the tank had run dry.
She sat there for a moment, dismayed. Every face in sight was now turned toward her, but she had realized by this time that not one of those she saw could see or help her. She got out of the car, hoping to find a garage somewhere nearby, or, if there was none, prepared to walk the rest of the way. As she slammed the door behind her, a voice called:
“Hey! Just a minute, mate!”
She turned and saw a man groping toward her.
“What is it?” she asked. She was by no means taken with the look of him.
His manner changed on hearing her voice.
“I’m lost. Dunno where I am,” he said.
“This is Regent Street. The New Gallery cinema’s just behind you,” she told him, and turned to go.
“Just show me where the curb is, miss, will you?” he said.
She hesitated, and in that moment he came close. The outstretched hand sought and touched her sleeve. He lunged forward and caught both her arms in a painful grip.
“So you can see, can you!” he said. “Why the hell should you be able to see when I can’t—nor anyone else?”
Before she realized what was happening he had turned her and tripped her, and she was lying in the road with his knee in her back. He caught both her wrists in the grasp of one large hand and proceeded to tie them together with a piece of string from his pocket. Then he stood up and pulled her onto her feet again.
“All right,” he said. “From now on you can do your seeing for me. I’m hungry. Take me where there’s a bit of good grub. Get on with it.”
* * *
—
“I think, Bill,” she said, “that though you wouldn’t have guessed it to look at him, he wasn’t perhaps too bad a man really. Only he was frightened. Deep down inside him he was much more frightened than I was. He gave me some food and something to drink. He only started beating me like that because he was drunk and I wouldn’t go into his house with him. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come along.” She paused. Then she added: “But I am pretty ashamed of myself. Shows you what a modern young woman can come to after all, doesn’t it? Screaming, and collapsing with the vapors——Hell!”
She was looking, and obviously feeling, rather better, though she winced as she reached for her glass.
“I think,” I said, “that I’ve been fairly dense over this business—and pretty lucky. I ought to have made more of the implications when I saw that woman with the child in Piccadilly. It’s only been chance that’s stopped me from falling into the same kind of mess that you did.”
“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence,” she said reflectively.
“I’ll go on bearing that in mind henceforth,” I told her.
“It’s already very well impressed on mine,” she remarked.
We sat listening to the uproar from the other pub for a few minutes.
“And what,” I said at last, “just what, do we propose to do now?”
“I must get back home. There’s my father. It’s obviously no good going on to try to find the doctor now—even if he has been one of the lucky ones.”
She seemed about to add something, but hesitated.
“Do you mind if I come too?” I asked. “This doesn’t seem to me the sort of time when anyone like us should be wandering about on his or her own.”
She turned with a grateful look.