Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming—a little girl’s smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his ducking had been only conventionally “splendid.”
“Hilda wants to thank you herself, don’t you, Hilda? She had such a horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the sea monster!” Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd.
Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy, though she evidently had not her sister’s ready mastery of what to say, and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine’s aplomb almost disconcerting.
“I do thank you very much.” She put her hand into Odd’s as he spoke, and left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness.
“What did you think of as you went down?” he asked her.
“In the river?” A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face.
“No, no! we won’t talk about the river, will we?” Odd said quickly. However funny Katherine’s greater common sense had found the incident, it had not been funny to Hilda. “Have you lived here long?” he asked. Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either side, Alicia was enjoying herself. “I have never seen you before, you know.”
“We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I think.”
“Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley.”
“Didn’t you like Allersley?” Hilda asked, with some wonder.