'I should wait for you to change back again,' said he. Was he the man that in Lady Blixworth's opinion the situation needed?
Peggy was eager in her explanation, but she seemed a little puzzled too.
'I know how much it is to ask,' she said, 'and there's no bond, no promise from you. But somehow it seems to me that I must see some more. Oh, there it all is, Tommy—waiting, waiting! Trix has made me feel that more and more. Was she all wrong? I don't know. Airey was there in the end, you see. And now there are all sorts of things behind her, making—making a background to it. I don't want all she's had; but, Tommy, I want some more.'
He heard her with a sober smile; if there were a touch of sadness in it, there was understanding too. They had come to her door in Harriet Street, and she stopped on the threshold.
'I sha'n't starve. You'll be there at tea-time,' said she with an appealing smile.
His man's feeling was against her. It was, perhaps, too much to ask of him that he should sympathise fully with her idea; he saw its meaning, but its meaning could not be his ideal. He would have taken her now at once, when, as his thoughts put it, the bloom was fresh and she had rubbed so little against the world. The instinct in her and the longings which bore her the other way were strange to him.
She knew it; the timidity of her beseeching eyes told that she asked a great thing—a thing that must be taken on faith, and must try his faith. Yet she could not but ask. The life of to-day was not yet done. Coming now, the life of to-morrow would come too soon. Very anxiously she watched his struggle, perhaps with an undefined yet not uncertain apprehension that its issue would answer the question whether he were in truth the man to whom she must come back, whether they two would in the end make terms and live as one. What her heart asked was, Could freedom and love be reconciled? Else, which must go to the wall? She feared that she might be forced to answer that question. Or would he spare it her?
Another moment wore away. His brows were knit into a frown; he did not look at her. Her eyes were on his, full of contending feelings—of trust and love for him, of hope for herself, it may be of a little shame that she must put him to such a trial. At last he turned to her and met her gaze with a friendly cheerful smile.
'Go out into the world and have your fling, Peggy. Take your heart and mine with you; but try to bring them both back to me.'
She caught his hand in hers, delighted that she could go, enraptured that his face told her that he trusted her to go.