“Dear me, no. Most natural. Charmingly high-spirited of you.”
“Well,” said Laura a little dryly, “it’s rather lucky you like me, isn’t it? Considering we’ve got to get married apparently.”
“Laura,” said Mr. Priestley, ceasing to beam, “I—I suppose you don’t happen to—well, to like me a little bit, too, do you?”
Feminine emotion is a delicate instrument, and no one can expect to play on a delicate instrument without practice. To Mr. Priestley’s consternation Laura burst into unexpected tears, tore herself from his arms, and ran from the room, crying out as she did so: “Good Heavens, I—I’m marrying you, aren’t I? What more do you want?”
Mr. Priestley stared after her as if imagining his eyes to be magnets and able to draw her back again. Finding they did not work in this way, he hurried after her. Her bedroom door was locked and Mr. Priestley, whispering urgently outside that he had something most important to tell her that would alter everything and wouldn’t she please come back and hear it, met with nothing but pointed, if tearful requests to go away. Looking round after three minutes’ fruitless work, he caught Barker’s disapproving but interested eye on him from the kitchen door. Barker’s eye succeeded where Laura’s entreaties had failed. Mr. Priestley went away, his urgent news untold.
Seventeen times during the course of the evening did he return to whisper at Laura’s door, seventeen times he retired baffled. Only once did Laura open it, and that was to pull in a loaded dinner-tray which Barker, surmising madly, had placed on the floor outside.
Mr. Priestley spent a miserable evening. Later on he went, in the deepest dejection, to bed.
But not to sleep. And as he turned restlessly from side to side and the thought of never seeing Laura again, after he had once told her the truth, grew more and more unbearable. Temptation came to Matthew Priestley. He struggled with it; he struggled with it manfully for a very long time (until four minutes past three, to be utterly accurate); and then Temptation, as it usually does, won. He would marry Laura to-morrow, as Cynthia had suggested. He would make sure of her first, and let the future look after itself. Oh, base Mr. Priestley!
Breakfast (which he took alone) found him confirmed in his turpitude. As he poured out his own coffee he knew he could not do without Laura and was going to stick at nothing to get her; as he passed himself the marmalade he told himself that all was fair in love and war; as he gazed at the unoccupied place beside him he tried, half-heartedly, to mitigate his villainy with the reflection that even marriage is not irrevocable; if Laura objected too strenuously, she could remain a wife in name only until the divorce was through. As he poured out his second cup of coffee he knew that he had not the faintest intention of letting Laura remain a wife in name only, and didn’t care a rap how base he was.
Pat Doyle would have been delighted. Mr. Priestley’s days of turniphood were done with forever. It was no snail who folded up Mr. Priestley’s napkin and banged it down on the table with a thud that made the crockery jump.