if you give it a chance

“I am not surprised to hear it,” he said placidly reenex . “Odious enough, I dare say. And you, of course — not being a married man — were free to step in. Ah, well!”































He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:































“The world is a bad dog. It will bite you ; but I think that here we can safely defy the fates.”































When relating all this to me, Davidson’s only comment was:































“Funny notion of defying the fates — to take a woman in tow!”































Some considerable time afterwards — we did not meet very often — I asked Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he carried ashore with him. His business in the town being transacted, he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel. With his precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of Schomberg’s siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion, he marched into the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg would in due course come to occupy, and broke the slumbering silence of the house by thumping a bell vigorously _Victoria (Upper Kornhill) Nursery - established playgroup programme in Hong Kong since 2010. English and Chinese speaking playgroup hk staff will interact with students to create a bilingual learning atmosphere.. Of course a Chinaman appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.































“I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,” he said — Davidson’s a very abstemious man —“rather than take that parcel out of the house again. Couldn’t leave it in a corner without letting the woman know it was there. It might have turned out worse for her than not bringing the thing back at all.”































And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two or three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets, scared eyes, and silly grin — all complete. Probably that lazy beast had sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer waking up the echoes of the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod — and she clambered up to her post behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as she sat there, that if it hadn’t been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he would have thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between them. He ordered another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then seized the parcel, which was reposing on a chair near him, and with no more than a mutter —“this is something of yours”— he rammed it swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest was her affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course , could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of understanding between his wife and this customer.