You may guess that my attention needed little inviting. So far, my surmise, that she adored him while she took the admiration a little impatiently, seemed to be pretty near the mark; and I was confirmed in this when she presently sat down on the companion ha.s.sock beyond the end of the fender, and, with her face a little averted, sank into moroseness. It was merely because her glance as she stood before the mirror had not been returned, but I myself had known too well what it was to be uplifted and cast down again by these nothings not to understand.

And Archie too understood, if the jocular and would-be easy manner in which he tried to drag her into the conversation again meant anything. I suspected that this was not the first incident of the kind that had occurred between them. Presently he had twice addressed her directly without getting more than the shortest of replies; and the third time he did so (he, Kitty and Miss Angela had been talking about some indifferent matter) he added the words, "that is, when Evie's found her tongue again."

My darling had a temper of her own. "I didn't know I'd lost it," she said, with a little perverse snap.

Then she dropped into her sulks again.

"These lovers' quarrels!" Miss Angela's private smile to me seemed to say; but this time I evaded the discreet invitation to partic.i.p.ate.

"Well," Archie said presently, looking at his watch, "I must be off; I've a chap to meet. Thanks, Aunt Angela (beg pardon; I know you don't like being called that). I'll come on Thursday, then."

But Miss Angela exclaimed: "A man to meet! At this hour!"

Archie took his hat from a chair. "Yes. About a dog. Why not? Fox terrier," he added facetiously; "must make sure they've got over the distemper, you know. Thursday then. You two are staying a bit, I suppose?" he invited us.

He made his adieux; but almost before the door had closed behind him Evie had risen from her ha.s.sock.

"You'll excuse me, won't you?" she said quickly. "I've got a headache. I shall go straight to bed. Good-night."

And she followed him out--whether straight to bed or not I don't know.

Kitty and I followed shortly afterwards.

And now that I've got to this Woburn Place portion of my story I may as well, while I am about it, skip the two intervening days and come to the evening of Archie Merridew's birthday.

Thursday was not in any case one of Evie's cla.s.s evenings, and on that Thursday she must have been very busy indeed. We were to go to supper at eight; and as the routine of the boarding house did not provide for private entertainments the aunt and niece had had all to do themselves.

The supper was therefore of necessity cold, with the exception of some hot soup, which I suspect to have been heated over a bedroom fire; and for the furnishing of the round table with the pink-shaded lamp Miss Angela had rummaged in drawers and trunks and bundles, with notable results. White heavy plates with the name of the boarding house contained within an oval garter were set between common knives and delicate and worn old silver forks and spoons, really beautiful gla.s.s finger-bowls stood on straw mats with a circular hole in the middle; and a long slender-handled punch-ladle stuck up out of the cheap earthenware jug full of home-made lemonade.

I suspect, too, that Evie had changed her mind a dozen times about the height of her dress at the neck; and probably her aunt's guidance had led her finally, since she had no special dress for the evening, to reject the compromise of altering her blouse to an intermediate =V=. Her dark hair had been newly washed. A softer lace than Kitty Windus' came quite up to her ears, and Miss Angela had lent her a pearl ring, which seemed to be mutely asking to be transferred to the finger next to the one on which she wore it. She was in white, with a longer skirt than usual; Miss Angela wore the old grey and Indian silk shawl she always wore; and Kitty looked prettier than I have ever seen her in a spotted blue foulard (I think I have that right) with wonderfully crimped sleeves and a cameo brooch at her rather wiry throat.

She and I arrived before Archie, who, indeed, was a full quarter of an hour late. When he did turn up, there mingled with his apologies the b.u.mptious a.s.sumption of ease with which he sought to make a joke of his negligence. He came in noisily, as if he intended to make the party a success out of hand; and before he had been in the room half-a-minute a whiff told me what I had instantly surmised from the brightness of his eyes--that he had been drinking sherry and bitters already.

"Thanks, Aunt Angela--but that's not all, I hope!" he cried, as Miss Angela wished him many happy returns of the day.

And he skipped to her, pa.s.sed his arm about her waist, and kissed her.

"Hope you won't mind for once, Jeff," he went on, dancing to Kitty Windus. Kitty both stiffened rigidly and flushed with excitement as he kissed her also on the cheek-bone.

"Here--I'm going all round now--where's Evie?" he demanded.

But Evie had slipped out of the room.

We sat down to supper.

I found Archie insufferable. He made the whole running with an ignorant egotism that caused my fingers to itch to box his ears. More than once he contradicted Miss Angela flatly, instantly trying to redeem the grossness by laughing loudly and crying, "Excuse my frankness--no offence--only Archie's way!" He made so familiar both with Kitty and myself that, out of mere hostility to him, I came very near to an alliance with her. Evie, I saw, was miserable. How much she knew about his habits I could only guess; I think that already she knew more than a little; but his had been the fortune to reveal her to herself, and I am not sure whether that ever wholly dies. I think it has since died as much as ever it can.

"But," Miss Angela said by-and-by, seeking to quieten him, "I've forgotten to ask you how your father is. Better, I hope?"

"The pater? Oh, he's all right; it's only a bilious attack. Afraid he got poisoned with some _foie gras_ he ate--jolly good tack _I_ call it--I'll have some more, please. And what's that you've got to drink there, Evie?"

Evie poured him out some lemonade. He looked at it, but made no remark on it.

"Here's your _foie gras_--have some cress with it," said Miss Angela.

And so we feted his lordship.

After supper there were nuts and almonds, which we ate sitting round the fire. I say "we," but Archie had what was left afterwards. With a "Half-a-mo," he had gone out, and I myself thought our party much pleasanter without him.

But as he remained away, Miss Angela had no choice but to say presently: "What _can_ have become of our young man? I wonder if you'd mind fetching him, Mr Jeffries!"

I went, and found him.

He had picked up, on the stairs or in the hall, a j.a.panese with whom he had contracted some sort of acquaintance, and I heard his call as I pa.s.sed the half-open door of the dining-room.

"Here--Jeff!" he called. "Hold on--I sha'n't be a minute--come and let me introduce you to Mr Shoto--Mr Shoto, Mr Jeffries."

I distrust that too affable little race from the other side of the world, and I gave Mr Shoto the most perfunctory of nods. Archie was having a very golden whisky and soda with him.

"Come along--you oughtn't to clear off like this," I said curtly. "Miss Soames is asking for you."

"All right--good old Angela--just a minute till I finish this. We were talking about j.a.pan, or rather Mr Shoto was. Tell him that about the Yoshiwara, Shoto."

But that cunning little alien had evidently summed me up already, and had a different choice of subject for me.

I haled Archie back. I wondered, as he sat down by Evie, whether he would have another man about another dog to see presently, but he hadn't. Magnanimously he gave us the whole of the rest of the evening.

This he did in spite of the cold encouragement he got from Evie. Twice, I was certain, while his face did not cease to be animated with the talk he gave the rest of us, his hand sought hers behind the arm of his chair; but she drew away. Nevertheless she drew away discreetly. By doing so openly she could have shown him up, but evidently she did not wish to show him up. There was no irreconcilable difference between them. She was angry, but not to the point of refusing to make it up afterwards. And I knew she was not far from unhappy tears.

Kitty and I were the first to leave. This was at half-past eleven, and I had no desire to outsit Archie. He would either leave in another half-hour, which would leave him time for another golden whisky and soda, or, setting the smoothing over of Evie's ruffled temper before the attractions of the public-house, would linger till after closing-time, when there would be no hurry. To see which alternative he would take didn't on the whole seem to be worth waiting for.

So Kitty and I took our leave; and as I walked with her to Percy Street--where she had two rooms over a modiste's--I--and she too--had to suffer as best we might the kind of thing I will relate in the next chapter.

IV

From the beginning she wanted one thing, I another. She was prepared to "love" me (as if it had been a matter of will, to which, nevertheless, I am quite certain she would faithfully have adhered) on the condition that that heart of hers should be no longer a parched pod; but I wanted no more of her than that my name should be linked with hers as that of her suitor. To me the appearance was the indispensable thing; she wanted the substance. And she was already plaguing me for it.

G.o.d knows I gave her what I could give. Afterwards, when all was over, she still had the memory of it. I hope she found comfort in it.

For of course it was precisely over that which was Evie's, and which I was resolved to keep for Evie, that we were locked in a grapple. She lisped and besought and cajoled. Before I began sometimes utterly to forget that we were betrothed at all I could often have groaned aloud at her inexpert playfulness; and I doubt whether the wit of man could have devised a more acute torture than that which I now began to undergo at her unsuspecting hands.

For Archie's birthday was early in March, and already the crocuses were out, and the barrows in the streets were so aflame with daffodils that the flowers almost illuminated the faces of the sellers of them. It was still cold and backward, but the days were long past the turn, and while single twigs were still of a wintry iron hue, in the ma.s.s they took a softness, and the vistas of the parks had perceptibly changed. In the streets of the wealthy in which I walked the house-painters were at work, painting doors and railings and window-boxes; and even at my King's Cross corner the railway companies' announcements told of the coming summer. Spring was breaking in London--spring, the merry time of the year--spring, when lovers cannot keep asunder--and when Kitty and myself could not, yet must, keep asunder.

In the streets I knew I was fairly safe. Her hand on my sleeve filled me with no repugnance. Let me, for example, tell you of our walk back to Percy Street on that night of Archie's birthday-party.

As we crossed Tottenham Court Road she slipped her hand into my overcoat pocket, and my own encountered it there. It held it. It retained it along dark Percy Street, and still retained it when we stopped together at the side door next the window with the two fly-blown hats on pedestals that formed the whole of the modiste's display. There I would have left her; but "Don't go just yet, Jeff," she begged; "just eentie walk?"

"Well, a short one," I said.

We turned up Fitzroy Street into the Marylebone Road, but I was wary of the dark empty s.p.a.ces about Regent's Park. The streets and the crowds for me. Indeed I may say that during this period of our "walking out" no couple in London sought solitude as I sought to avoid it; and I resolutely suppressed the thought of what was going to happen when the warm days should come and she should ask me to take her to Richmond or Epping or Kew. It was no good meeting that horror half way.