Even if Sophia could lay her hand on the volume at once, he would have had his quarter of an hour and be comfortably back long before she could pass the arch which separated the two rooms; for, as we have seen, this instantaneous action was one of the chief recommendations of the Time Cheques.
So he cashed his cheque, and was at once transported to the secluded passage between the deck-cabins, the identical place where he had first conversed with Miss Davenport. He was on the same steamer-chair too, and she was at his side; the wind carried the faint strains of a set of "Lancers" to them; from all of which circumstances he drew the inference that he was going to be favoured with the sequel to the conversation that had been so incongruously broken in upon by Sophia's question respecting the comparative merits of bottle-jacks in the Tottenham Court Road warehouse. This was so far satisfactory, indicating as it did that he was at last, after so much trying back, to make some real progress.
"What I want to know first," Miss Davenport was saying, "is, whether you are capable of facing danger for my sake?"
"I thought," he remonstrated mildly, "that I had already given proof of that!"
"The danger you faced then threatened only me. But, supposing you had to meet a danger to yourself, could you be firm and cool? Much will depend on that."
"I--I think," he answered frankly, "that perhaps you had better not count upon me. I have never been a man to court danger: it might find me equal to it if it came,--or it might not."
He did not mean to give it the opportunity.
"Then we are lost, that is all!" she said, with gloomy conviction. "Lost, both of us!"
Peter certainly intended to be lost if the moment of trial ever arrived. Even now he was resolving, for about the twentieth time, that this positively should be his very last cheque; for he by no means liked the manner in which the situation seemed to be developing.
But, seeing that the danger, whatever it might be, was still far enough off, he thought, very sensibly, that it would be a pity to cloud this last interview by any confession of pusillanimity. Knowing that he would return no more, he could surely afford to treat with contempt any consequences his imprudence might have entailed.