“Now wait till I get my hat and coat,” she said, “and off we go.”
She was back in a few moments, her piquant face set off by a most becoming toque, and her painting apron replaced by a long wrap.
“All right,” she said, and a moment later they were walking down the steps together.
Not till then did he have an opportunity to look at her, and he was struck with a sudden sense of strangeness. This was not the Betty Heywood he had known, but a woman brighter, more dashing, more self-assured. He was surprised, in a way, to find that there was no shadow of her father’s failure on her. He had expected to find her labouring with that sorrow, or at least showing visible traces of it, and he wondered how she had escaped so completely.
She glanced at him once or twice, as they turned together along one of the paths of the park, and opened her lips to speak, but closed them again, as though hesitating how to begin.
“You’re still at Wadsworth?” she asked, at last.
“Oh, yes.”
“In the dispatchers’ office?”
“Chief dispatcher now,” he said.
“Are you?” she said. “Isn’t that fine! But I knew you’d work your way right up. Do you know, you’ve developed into just the sort of man that you were a boy.”