“You are too good, Miss Archinard.”
“To an old friend? A man I have followed and admired as I have you? Lord Allan, I respect you from the bottom of my heart for the way in which you have borne this knock-down from fate. You are strong, it won’t hurt you in the end. Let me know how you get on.”
Katherine’s eyes were compelling in their candid kindness. Lord Allan said that he would, with emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a reviving beneficence. He felt that the blow was perhaps not so bad as he had imagined—might even be for the best; better for him, for his career. Katherine’s words enveloped him in an atmosphere that was soothing.
Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of tea, and made, as she looked thoughtfully into the fire, a second little moue of self-disapprobation.
CHAPTER VII
ODD, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine—the morning spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda—excluded the hours of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity.
Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd’s face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine’s eye was very clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that through Allan Hope’s discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and Hilda’s drudgery as binding.
Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense of malaise.
One was that Allan Hope’s smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a Katherine.
Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter’s haggard looks.