They both acted their parts well; each successfully imposed on the other. But pretence on this one point did not hinder a genuine sympathy nor a reciprocal attraction between them. He seemed to her the haven that she might have loved, yet had always scorned; she was to him the type of that moving, many-coloured, gay life which his allegiance to his jealous god forbade him to follow or to know. And they were united again by a sense common to them, apart from the rest of the company—the sense of dissatisfaction; it was a subtle bond ever felt between them, and made them turn to one another with smiles half-scornful, half-envious, when the merriment rose high.
'I'm glad to meet you to-night,' she said, 'because I think I can tell you that your advice—your Paris advice—has been a success.'
'You seemed rather doubtful about that when we met last.'
'Yes, I was.' She laughed a little. 'Oh, I've had some troubles, but I think I'm in smooth water now.' She hardly repressed the ring of triumph in her voice.
'Ah, then you won't come again to Danes Inn!'
There was an unmistakable regret in his tone. Trix felt it echoed in her heart. She met his glance for a moment; the contact might have lasted longer, but he, less practised in such encounters, turned hastily away. Enough had passed to tell her that if she did not come she would be missed, enough to make her feel that in not going she would lose something which she had come to think of as pleasant in life. Was there always a price to be paid? Great or small, perhaps, but a price always?
'You should come sometimes where you can be seen,' she said lightly.
'A pretty figure I should cut!' was his good-humoured, rather despairing comment.
Trix was surprised by a feeling stronger than she could have anticipated; she desired to escape from it; it seemed as though Airey Newton and his friends were laying too forcible a hold on her. They had nothing to do with the life that was to be hers; they were utterly outside that, though they might help her to laugh away an evening or amuse her with their comments on human nature and its phases. To her his friends and he were essentially a distraction; they and he must be kept in the place appropriate to distractions.