The fierce bitterness of her tone was so incisive, so genuine, that most men under the circumstances would have felt extremely foolish, and looked correspondingly abject. Into Kenneth Kershaw’s very heart her words seemed to cut like so many whip lashes. By a mighty effort he restrained himself from pleading provocation, feeling, any mitigation whatever; which would have been the worst line he could possibly have taken. Instead he adopted a kind of quietly resigned tone, with just a touch of the dignified; apologetic, yet without a trace of abjectness—which was the best.
“May, dear, forgive me,” he said. “I was not thinking, I suppose. Have I offended you beyond recall? Well, I must pay the penalty; for of course you are going to tell me you never want to set eyes on me again.”
He knew how to play his cards. Even then his words seemed to open a dreadful blank before her mind’s eye. Not to set eyes on him again? He seemed to mean it, too. That air of sad self-composure with which he had spoken them disarmed her, and her anger melted.
“No, no, I don’t mean that,” she answered, slowly, in a dazed kind of manner. “But why did you do it? We were such friends before.”
“And are we not to be again?” is the reply that would have arisen to most men’s lips. But this one knew when to let well alone.
“Forget it, May,” he said. “Believe me, I never wanted to offend you. And don’t think hard things of me when I am away, will you? Good-bye.”
“No, no. But you had better go now. Good-bye.”
Her tone was flurried, with an admixture of distress. It was just the time not to answer. He went out, and as he walked away from the house, he felt not ill-satisfied with himself and his doings in spite of his very decided repulse. As touching this last some men might have felt rather small. Not so this one. A subtle, unerring instinct told him that he had come out with all the honours of war.
“It is only the first step,” he said to himself. “You were frightened at first, my darling, but the time will come, and that sooner than you think, when you shall kiss me back again, and that with all the sweet ardour and passion wherewith I shall kiss you.”
Then a very blank thought took hold upon his mind. What if all the sympathy he had created in her was reflex—if whatever feeling she had for him or would come to have was due solely to his complete likeness to that other? Why the mere sight of Colvin, a chance glimpse in some public place such as when they two had first met, might shatter his own carefully calculated chances. It was a horrid thought—that at any moment that unpalatable relative of his might appear and spoil everything.