1
Looking out of his window at the office in the afternoon, Luke Sharper saw a motor-car stop in front of the draper’s opposite. Lady Tyburn got out and entered the shop. So she was back.
Putting on his hat, so far as his agitated ears would permit, Luke rushed out into the street, crossed the road, and met her as she came out.
“Jona,” he panted.
“Lukie, at last,” she gasped.
“You were not long in the shop!”
“Just the same length that I am outside. I have been there three times to-day. Standing there, looking up at your window. Every time I bought a yard of elastic. Do you want any elastic?”
“No, thank you. Will you have a cup of tea?”
Emotion would not permit her to speak. But she nodded and got into the car. He followed her. On the way to the confectioner’s neither of them spoke a word.
At the tea-room the following conversation took place: “Tea?”
“Please.”
“Milk?”
“Thanks.”
“Sugar?”
“No.”
“Buns?”
“One.”
And then they sat and gazed at one another, slowly champing buns in which they took no interest whatever. After twenty minutes Lady Tyburn said: “My chauffeur has had no tea. He must drive to Gallows and have tea at once. Will you come too?”
“As far as the gates,” he said. “I’ll walk back. I’m not coming in.”
“Do,” she said. “Bill has borrowed a panther from the Mammoth Circus, and they’re having larks with it in the billiard-room.”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t like panthers,” he said wearily. “I don’t like anything much. Mabel looks like a panther sometimes.”
During the twenty minutes’ drive up to Gallows neither of them spoke.
When they reached the gate, Jona said: “Better come up to the house and finish our talk.”
“No,” said Luke; “stay here a little. There’s something I must say to you. I’ve been trying to say it for the last hour. It gets stuck. I shall pull it out somehow.”
Lady Tyburn sent the car away, and they sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He sat on one side, and she on the other, back to back. They could not bear to look one another in the face. Presently she said:
“You’re trembling, Lukie. I can feel it. Trembling. Like a jelly.”
“You’re another,” said Luke. “Oh, Jona. There’s something I’ve been trying to ask you for the last ten months, and perhaps there will never be another opportunity. Do you remember when you came to my office?”
She drove her elbow lightly into his ribs. It seemed to him to signify she did remember.
“There were things you said—‘Will you help yourself,’ with your hands out—‘magnet and tin-tack’—‘I made a mistake once.’ You said those things, Jona.”
“What a memory the young man has got,” said Jona, wistfully.
“Yes, but what did you mean?”
“Well, they were what is called conversation. You talk too, you know, sometimes.”
“But that doesn’t tell me what you meant.”
“They meant,” she said in a plain, matter-of-fact way, “that I ought not to have married Bill. I ought to have married you, Lukie. My mistake entirely. Don’t apologize.”
She jerked herself backward, and he fell off the tree. He lay on the grass moaning. “O crikey! O crikey! O crikey, crikey, crikey!”