With that, or, rather, after a little idle talk which added nothing to that, he left me—left me wondering still. He was sorry for Fräulein, and not only because she must go forth into the world; also because she had not been invited to become Mrs Charley Miles! He conceived that he had made a conquest, and he didn’t value it! His mistake of fact was great, but it shrank to nothing before the immensity of his blunder in estimation. I could account for it only in one way—a way so pleasing to my own vanity that I adopted it forthwith. And I’m not sure I was wrong. The veil had not been lifted for him, and he had no eyes to see through it. For me it had been raised once, and henceforth eternally hung transparent.
“That’s my home.” She had looked in that moment as if no other place could be.
Now, however, she was advertising for a situation, and I speculated as to how much of the truth Mrs Thistleton would deem it wise to employ in justifying that sublime “Well-connected.”
VI
I SAW her the next day but one—on the morning when the third “insertion” appeared in The Morning Post. Bessie Thistleton had told me, with obvious annoyance, that there had been no replies yet. “Governesses are really a drug, unless they have a degree, in these days,” she had said. “ ‘Where is she?’ Oh, somewhere in the garden, I think, Mr Tregaskis.”
So I went into the garden and found her again under the tree. But her big book was not with her now; she was sitting idle, looking straight ahead of her, with pondering and, perhaps, fear in her great dark eyes.
She gave me her hand to shake. I kissed it.
“Nobody will kiss my hand in my next place,” she said.
“Why in heaven do you do it?”
“I can’t beg; and if I did, I don’t think I should receive.” She leant forward, resting her hand on the arm of the chair. “We don’t know who I’m to be,” she went on, smiling. “Nobody but Mrs Thistleton could carry it off if I confessed to being myself! Who shall I be, Mr Tregaskis?”