That very afternoon Mr. Arthur had received the intimation at his bank that he was shortly to be made a cashier. He glowed with the prospect. His conversation that evening was of the brightest. The poisoned shafts of Miss Hallard's satire met the armoured resistance of his high spirits. They fell--pointless and unavailing--from his unbounded faith in himself. A man who, after a comparatively few years' service in a bank, is deemed fitted for the responsible duties of a cashier, is qualified to express an opinion, even on art. Mr.

Arthur expressed many.

"Don't see how you can say a thing's artistic if you don't like it,"

he declared.

"I think you're quite right, Mr. Arthur," said Mrs. Hewson. "If I like a thing--like that picture in one of the Christmas Annuals--I always say, 'Now I call that artistic,' don't I, Ern?"

Her husband nodded with his mouth full of the best bloater.

"Well, you couldn't call that thing artistic, Mrs. Hewson, if you mean the thing that's over the piano in the sitting-room?"

"Why not?" asked Janet; "don't you like it?"

"No," said Mr. Arthur emphatically, "nor any one else either, I should think. I bet you a shilling they wouldn't."

"But Mrs. Hewson does," Janet replied quietly. "Doesn't that satisfy you that it must be artistic, since some one likes it?"

Mrs. Hewson, finding herself suddenly the object of the conversation, picked her teeth in hurried confusion. Her husband surveyed the company over the rim of his cup and then returned to his reading of the evening paper.

During the weighted silence that followed Janet's last remark, he laid down his paper.

"I see," he said, "as 'ow there are some people up in the north of England 'aving what they call Pentecostal visitations."

Mrs. Hewson laughed tentatively, the uncertain giggle that scarcely dares to come between the teeth. She knew her husband's leaning towards the arid humour of an obscure joke.

"What's that, Ern?"

"Well, 'cording to the paper, they get taken with it sudden. They can't stand up. They fall down in the middle of the service and roll about, just as if they'd 'ad too much to drink."

Mrs. Hewson's laugh became genuine and unafraid, a hysterical clattering of sounds that tumbled from her mouth.

"Silly fools," she said; "the way people go on. Read it--what is it?

Read it."

Mr. Hewson picked some bones out of the bloater with a dirty hand, placed the filleted morsel in his mouth, washed it down with a mouthful of tea, and then cleared his throat and began to read.

Mr. Arthur seized this opportunity. "It's quite fine again now," he said in an undertone to Sally.

She expressed mild surprise--the lifting of her eyebrows, the casual "Really." Then it seemed to her that he did not exactly deserve to be treated like that and she told him how she had got wet through, coming home.

"Changed your clothes, I hope," he whispered.

"Oh yes."

"You might get pneumonia, you know," he said.

She smiled at that. "And of such are the Kingdom of Heaven."

He gazed at her in surprise. "Why should you say that?" he asked.

"Don't know--why shouldn't I?"

He looked down at his empty plate. There was something he wanted to say to her. He kept looking round the table for inspiration. At last, with Mrs. Hewson's burst of laughter at the paper's description of the Pentecostal visitations, he took the plunge--head down--the words spluttering in whispers out of his lips.

"Would you care to come for a little walk down the Strand-on-Green?"

he asked. "It's a lovely night now."

In the half breath of a second, Sally's eyes sought Janet's face across the table. Janet had heard and, with her eyes, she urged Sally to accept. This all pa.s.sed unknown to Mr. Arthur. He thought Sally was hesitating--the moments thumped in his heart.

"I don't mind for a little while," she said.

He rose from the table, conscious of victory. "I'll just go and get on my boots," he said, and he slipped away.

Sally mounted to her room followed by Janet.

"He's going to propose," said Miss Hallard.

"He's not," retorted Sally.

"I'm perfectly certain he is. He's been excited about something all the evening. He's come into some money or something. He talked to-night as if he could buy up all the art treasures in the kingdom."

"You think he's going to buy me up?"

"He's going to make his offer. What'll you do?"

"Well--what can I do? Would you marry him?"

"That's not the question. There's no chance of him asking me. You can't speculate on whether you'll marry a man until he asks you--your mind is bia.s.sed before then."

"I don't believe you'd marry any one," said Sally.

"It's quite probable," she replied laconically.

Sally began to take off her hat again. "I'm not going out with him,"

she said. "I shall hate it."

"Don't be foolish--put on that hat, and see what it's like to be proposed to by an earnest young gentleman on the banks of a river, at nine o'clock in the evening. Go on--don't be foolish, Sally. It does a woman good to be proposed to--teaches her manners--go on. You may like him--you don't know."

Sally obeyed reluctantly. In the heart of her was a dread of it; in her mind, the tardy admission that she was doing her duty, sacrificing at the altar upon which every woman at some time or other is compelled to make her offering.

In the little linoleum'd pa.s.sage, known as the hall, Mr. Arthur was waiting for her. He had exchanged his felt slippers for a pair of boots; round his neck he had wrapped an ugly m.u.f.fler and a cap was perched jauntily on his head. The impression that he gave Sally, of being confident of his success, stung her for a moment to resentment.

She determined to refuse him. But that mood was only momentary. When the door had closed behind them and they had begun to walk along the paved river path, the impression and its accompanying decision vanished.

Sally was a romantic--that cannot be denied. She could talk reverently about love in the abstract. In her mind, it was not a condition into which one fell, as the unwary traveller falls into the ditch by the roadside, picking himself out as quickly as may be, or, in his weariness, choosing at least to sleep the night there and go on with his journey next morning. In the heart of Sally, whether it were a pitfall or not, love was an end in itself. She directed all her steps towards that destination, and any light of romance allured her.

That evening, walking up towards Kew Bridge, the lights of the barges lying in the stream, looking themselves like huddled reptiles seeking the warmth of each other's bodies, the lights of the little buildings on the eyot, and the lamps of the bridge itself, all dancing quaint measures in the black water, brought to the susceptibility of Sally's mind a sense of romance. For the moment, until he spoke, she forgot the actual presence of Mr. Arthur. The vague knowledge that some one was with her, stood for the indefinite, the unknown quant.i.ty whose existence was essential to the completion of the whole.

As they pa.s.sed by the City Barge--that little old-fashioned inn which faces the water on the river path--she looked in through the windows.