The Argosy — page 336: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Mr. Fermyn’s Racquet. 317 horror of the situation, she first of all resolved to feign illness, and to go to bed; to go to bed, and to resolutely sleep away all to-night and to-morrow. Then making up her mind to the impossibility of that course, she formed a desperate design of confessing everything upon the spot to Mr. Jermyn, and then threw that proposition even more hastily aside than she had done the first one. And she finally swept down again to the drawing-room as if nothing had happened, to listen from afar to a heated discussion between Mr. Jermyn and someone else as to the relative merits of grass and asphalte tennis-courts. At the end of it the someone else turned a laughing appeal to her; and she answered it laughingly. Laughingly !—and the racquet was gone. ‘There was nothing she could do—or at least only one thing which she ought to do—to tell Mr. Jermyn, and she shrank from that as from the plague. Oh, if the rain would but pour and pour so that there could be no match; that at least might be a respite. As the thought struck her, later on, when she was sitting in mental torture in the privacy of her own room, she pushed back the curtain of the window once more. Alas, alas, the moon was actually shining again. It must have been the terrible anxiety of the night that made her sleep so far into the morning. ‘The full bright sun was streaming in upon her. Nine from the cuckoo clock, and half past nine was the hour for the match! She must go down and see. Above all things—she realised 1t now—she must tell the truth to Mr. Jermyn. Perhaps he knew the truth already. Whoever had taken the racquet away had perhaps given it him, and told him where it was found. One sees things in such a different light in the morning. She hada cup of tea brought to her, and then went resolutely down stairs—not by the side way this time; nothing could have induced her to pass the place where the wraps lay—but down the broad, glittering, sunny grand staircase. As she came within sight of the busy hall, into the full power of the warm sunbeams, she shivered. She was a very beautiful woman; there was no doubt of it. The hall was crowded with hurrying comers and goers, but there was hardly one who did not turn to look back at her. Just as her foot touched the lower step, a man in a tennis suit came hastily out of a side room, started and bowed. “Good morning, Miss Raymond! I am glad to see you down in time for the match. Your aunt mentioned that you were not feeling well. By the way, have you heard about poor Jermyn?” Her face blanched. “Poor Jermyn!” she repeated, mechanically. At the same instant a laugh broke beside her. Yes, indeed, poor Jermyn! He was standing close to her. She caught her lip between her teeth, and turned whiter than ever. A moment more, and a strange look flashed suddenly into the girl’s expressive blue eyes. JM. JSermyn’s right arm was tn a sling. CORnNICELOO CS (SO) An