(Ah, Billy, why did you? We were such chums!) Caddish of him! To think that he might—that I could be treated so!
That fact remained—and all the waves in the Bay of Many Waters hadn’t washed any of its bitterness away. As for that mad, mad fancy of mine afterwards on the beach—well! it must have been something like the way people declare that the whole of a drowning person’s past life rises before them in the moment of peril. Only, of course, those would be pictures of things that had happened—not the reverse of anything that ever, ever could happen!
One thing—I’d never let him thank me for the outwardly magnanimous act into which I’d been just forced, and which had left me too utterly exhausted even to rage over it as I might. My arms felt almost too limp to raise to my head as I wrung my streaming hair into a towel and pinned it, still wet, firmly about my head. It took me minutes to put on each garment. Meantime those minutes were ebbing away, and these people downstairs were being kept waiting, expecting to see his official fiancée at the tea-table. And if I felt I couldn’t stay up here as I longed to do, it wasn’t on his account. It wasn’t the girl he’d engaged—and insulted so!—it was his mother’s guest who confronted in the wavy looking-glass her very washed-out appearance, her dark, ringed eyes and damp hair plastered down to keep it from dripping on to the first clean blouse that had come to hand.
Certainly I looked very little credit to him!
With a shrug I turned away and went downstairs.
* * * * *
The warm kitchen seemed full of people and their voices, and of a mingled scent of brewing tea and warm butter and—could it be a whiff of perfume: trèfle? The tea-table was crowded with Mrs. Roberts’ gayest crockery, with her largest black teapot, with mounds of yellow light-cakes and clusters of brown eggs and great slabs of Welsh farmhouse bread-and-butter. In the middle a glass jug held a bouquet of heather and honeysuckle and blue scabious. There was a dish of damson jam, and a very golden, “shoppy” cake.
At the head of the table, Mrs. Waters was entertaining a stout, sallow gentleman with a black moustache and a plaid tie, who was talking French very fast and with a good deal of gesture. Blanche, elbows on the table, was leaning eagerly across it to talk; opposite to her were her brother, looking much as usual again, I saw, and Theodora in a state of flushed animation, from whom, in the general babble, I caught something that sounded like “tell Billy’s sweetheart—” and between Theodora and him there sat, leaning back in her chair and laughing gaily, a young girl in a wonderfully-cut and simple get-up of flame-yellow and white and cream, with a swirl of feathery yellow about her midnight black hair; one of the prettiest girls I’d ever seen in my life. Ah! it was she who’d brought in that whiff of clover-scent?
She was laughing up into his face.
And she was calling my official fiancé “Billy.”