Dick kissed her gently. "You don't want to think too much about her," he said. "She's paying the price."
CHAPTER IV
COMING HOME FROM THE BALL
"This is where we are going to shoot to-morrow. We've kept this side entirely until now. We ought to do pretty well."
Bobby Trench, muffled up to the cigar he was smoking, sat by the side of Dick, who was driving the big omnibus back from the West Meadshire Hunt Ball. The two fine horses, making nothing of the load behind them, trotted rhythmically homewards. Heavy rain had ceased, and the moon peeping through scudding clouds shone on pools of water lying on the muddy road. The yellow lamp-rays tinged the wide strips of turf bordering the roadway, and lit up successive tree trunks, posted sentinel-like, behind the oak fences.
Bobby Trench had chosen to sit outside, with Dick and Frank. His evening had been disappointing. He had arrived at Kencote in time for dinner, prepared to make himself pleasant all round, which he seemed to have succeeded in doing to everybody except Joan, who had held somewhat coldly aloof, although he had kept strictly to his predetermined plan of treating her with cool friendliness until the ball should give him opportunities of carefully graded tenderness. But the ball had given him no opportunities, or none that Joan would allow him to take advantage of. She had snubbed him, had shown herself, indeed, determined to find occasions for snubbing him; for he was agile in skipping out of the way of such occasions, but she had pursued his skippings and dealt her strokes in spite of them. She had primly refused him more than two dances, and had refused to go in to supper with him. His anticipated pleasure having thus resolved itself into puzzled pain, Bobby Trench had declared himself for tobacco and the night air, and left Joan to her reflections inside, barbing them, as he handed her in, with a careless example of his own peculiar humour, which was founded on the basis of a cheery and always ready loquacity.
Snubs, or attempted snubs, received with no diminution of self-assurance or good-temper, at both of which they may be supposed to be aimed, are apt to recoil on those who administer them; and Joan, taking refuge between the comforting skirts of Virginia and Miss Dexter, was already reproaching herself for her treatment of one who had given her no cause for it except his presence, and whose persistent cheerfulness under persecution was a shining lesson to ill-temper. She was feeling miserable enough, in all conscience, and need not have beaten down the last sparks of enjoyment that she might have gained from the bright movement, hitherto eagerly anticipated, by setting herself to a task so little productive of satisfaction.
But she did not occupy her thoughts for long with Bobby Trench. She made up her mind that, having shown him that particular attention from him would not be welcome, she might safely return to the chaffing intimacy which had hitherto been the note of their intercourse, and had been quite as efficacious in keeping him at the requisite distance as her recent manner. And having so decided she dismissed him from her mind and wrapped herself round with her unhappiness.
It was dreadful to be going home from a ball, not only with no retrospective pleasure, but with nothing to look forward to in the way of disrobing talk. She and Nancy, since her wrecked attempt at reconciliation, had carried their respective heads in the air, and had hardly spoken to one another, except in the presence of their handmaid, for the purpose of averting comment. And yet she knew that Nancy's happy fate was marching upon her, and reproached herself a thousand times for her inability to cross the gulf between them, and share her sister's doubts and sweet tremors. John Spence had danced with her three times—many times with Nancy—and his manner had been brotherly-kind and protecting, as if to soothe her soreness, which yet he did not seem to have divined. His thoughts had not been much with her, that had been plain—but his quietness and simplicity had comforted her a little, and she had not wanted to talk. She had taken refuge in a plea of headache, and held to it on the homeward drive.