Mr. Wriford asked her: "Where are they all going?"
"Why, they're going to the Gardens, of course. There isn't half a jolly band plays there Saturday evenings."
She was the prettiest little thing, as Mr. Wriford looked at her, standing there beside him. He liked her merry ways, so different from his own habitual quietude. It occurred to him that, apart from that walk to the station together some weeks before, he hardly ever had spoken to her out of her parents' company. Why not?—so pretty and jolly as she was.
A sudden impulse came to him. He hesitated to speak it. She might resent the suggestion. He looked at her again—those funny little twitchings of her lips! "May I take you for a stroll, Essie?" he said.
There was not the least reason to have hesitated. Essie's face showed her pleasure. She quite jumped from her leaning pose against the doorway. "Oh, that's fine!" cried Essie. "I'll just pop on my chapeau. I won't be half a tick."
She was gone with the words, and he heard her running briskly up the stairs to her room and then very briskly down again and then in the parlour, crying: "Dad, me an' the lodger are going for a stroll in the Gardens. Sure you've got everything you want, Mother? Look, there's the new silk when you've finished that ball. Isn't it pretty, though!" and then the sound of a kiss for Mother and a kiss for Dad; and then coming to him, gaily swinging her gloves in a brown little hand, her eyes quite extraordinarily sparkling.
"There you are!" cried Essie, and they started. "That wasn't long, was it? Why, some girls, you know, keep their young fellows waiting a treat."
"Do they?" said Mr. Wriford, a trifle coldly.
"Don't they just!" cried Essie, noticing nothing that his tone might have been intended to convey, and beginning, as they went on in silence, to walk every now and then with a gay little skip as though by that means to exercise her delighted spirits.
Mr. Wriford, now that he was embarked upon his sudden impulse, found himself somehow dissatisfied with it. He would have been embarrassed, perhaps a little disappointed, he told himself, had she refused his invitation. He found himself embarrassed, perhaps a little piqued, that she had accepted it so readily, taken it so much as a matter of course. And then there was that "young fellow" expression with its obvious implication. His idea had been that she would have shown herself conscious of being—well, flattered, by his invitation. Not, he assured himself, that there was anything flattering in it; but still—. Perhaps, though, she was more conscious of it than she had seemed to show; and coming to that thought he asked her suddenly, giving her the opportunity to say so: "I hope you didn't mind my proposing to take you for a walk?"