Anna the adventuress Author:Edward Phillips Oppenheim Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ANNA? OR ANNABEL? SIR JOHN was wholly unable to understand the laugh and semi-ironical cheer which greeted his entrance to the smoking-room of ... more »the English Club on the following evening. He stood upon the threshold, dangling his eye-glasses in his fingers, stolid, imperturbable, mildly interrogative. He wanted to know what the joke against him was ? if any. " May I inquire," he asked smoothly, " in what way my appearance contributes to your amusement? If there is a joke I should like to share it." A fair-haired young Englishman looked up from the depths of his easy chair. " You hear him ? " he remarked, looking impressively around. " A joke! Sir John, if you had presented yourself here an hour ago we should have greeted you in pained silence. We had not then recovered from the shock. Our ideal had fallen. A sense of loss was amongst us. Drummond," he continued, looking across at his textit{vis-a-vis, " we look to you to give expression to our sentiment. Your career at the bar has given you a command of language, also a self-control not vouchsafed to us ordinary mortals. Explain to Sir John our feelings." Drummond, a few years older, dark, clean-shaven, with bright eyes and humorous mouth, laid down his paper and turned towards Sir John. He removedhis cigarette from his lips and waved it gently in the air. " Holcroft," he remarked, " in bald language, and with the usual limitations of his clouded intellect, has still given some slight expression to the consternation which I believe I may say is general amongst us. We looked upon you, my dear Sir John, with reverence, almost with awe. You represented to us the immaculate Briton, the one Englishman who typified the Saxonism, if I may coin a word, of our race. We have seen great and sober-minded men com...« less