‘Did I? I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I like our feelings to be our very very own, and never to show them to any one else at all. I dare say it is absurd, but that is my instinct.’
‘Never mind, dear, it wasn’t such a big jump as all that. Where are we going?’
‘Come here, Maude, into the waiting-room.’
She followed him into the gloomy, smoky, dingy room. Bare yellow benches framed an empty square of brown linoleum. A labouring man with his wife and a child sat waiting with the stolid patience of the poor in one corner. They were starting on some Saturday afternoon excursion, and had mistimed their train. Maude Selby and Frank Crosse took the other corner. He drew a jeweller’s box from his pocket and removed the lid. Something sparkled among the wadding.
‘O Frank! Is that really it?’
‘Do you like it?’
‘What a broad one it is! Mother’s is quite thin.’
‘They wear thin in time.’