Another ring at the front door answered his question and Norah's suitor came in. He was a loose-jointed young man of about twenty-two, with tumbled wavy hair, bright gray eyes, and a trick, when he was feeling shy, of supporting with one arm the small of his back. His long, dogmatic chin was balanced by an irregular and humorous mouth; his personality was attractive, and if he had earned five times as much as he earned as reporter on the staff of the Evening Herald, or even if he had been paid for the fierce and satirical articles he wrote on the condition of modern society for a socialist weekly called The Red Lamp, he might not have been considered an unsuitable mate for Norah. As it was, Mr. Caffyn looked up at him with as much abhorrence as he would have betrayed at the entrance into his dining-room of the dog that his children were always threatening to procure and the purchase of which he was constantly forbidding. Wilfred tried hard to lose himself in the round game, and whenever he was called upon to make a shot from the corner where Mr. Caffyn was sitting he did so with such unwillingness to disturb Mr. Caffyn that he always missed it. Every time he found an opportunity to pass Norah in the narrow gangway between the wall and the table he tried to squeeze her hand; and he did his best by bribing Vincent with some horse-chestnuts he had collected that morning at Kew, where his work had taken him to investigate an alleged outrage in the Temperate House, to inspire Vincent with an unquenchable desire to play Up Jenkins. Norah, however, had a plan of her own that made the notion of occasionally clasping Wilfred's hand under the table during Up Jenkins seem colorless, and Wilfred, who in his most optimistic prevision of the evening had not counted upon more than two or three kisses snatched by ruse, suddenly found himself invited by her to abandon the game and come into the drawing-room next door.
The drawing-room of No. 17 was invested every Wednesday afternoon by a quantity of punctilious ladies who came to call on Mrs. Caffyn. Owing to the number of its ornaments and the flimsiness of its furniture, it was not considered a suitable room for general use; moreover, as secretary of the Church of England Purity Society, it occasionally fell to Mr. Caffyn's lot to interview various clergymen there on confidential matters, and in a house like 17 Lonsdale Road, worn and torn by children, it was essential to preserve one room in a condition of gelid perfection. So rarely was the room used that the over-worked servants had not bothered to draw the curtains at dusk, and when Wilfred and Norah retired into its seclusion the chilly gloom was accentuated by the street-lamps gleaming through the bare lime-trees at the end of the garden. Norah told her lover to light the gas, and not even the sickly green incandescence availed to make her appear less beautiful to him in this desert of ugly knickknacks.
"No, don't pull the curtains," she said, quickly, "and don't kiss me here, because people might see you from the street. I didn't ask you to come in here to make love."
Perhaps a sense of the theater had always been dormant in Norah, for she went on as if she were making a set speech; but Wilfred was much too deep in love to let the cynicism upon which he plumed himself apply to her, and he listened humbly.
"We can't go on like this forever," she wound up. "We must be engaged openly. I told father that last night, but he won't hear of it, so what are we to do?"
"Darling, I'm ready to do anything."
"Oh, anything!" she repeated, petulantly. "What is anything? He'll be here in a minute, and you've got to tell him that unless he consents to our being engaged you'll persuade me to elope."
"Do you think he'd give way then?" Wilfred asked, doubtfully. He was very much in love with Norah, but he could not help remembering that he, too, had a father who, after an argument every Sunday evening, still allowed him ten shillings a week for pocket-money. If he were to elope, he should not only be certain to lose that supplement to his own earnings, but he should also involve in deeper discredit the profession he had adopted instead of the law, which Mr. Curlew, senior, had designed him to enter by way of the office of an old friend who was a solicitor.
Norah wished that her father would come in and interrupt what should have been a passionate scene, but which was in reality as cold as the room where it was being played. She watched herself and Wilfred, whom the incandescent gas did not set off to advantage, in the large mirror that formed the over-mantel of the fireplace, and she realized now, as she had never realized before in her life, how amazingly she stood out from her surroundings.
"You haven't kissed me once this evening," Wilfred began; but she shook herself free from his tentative embrace, and with one eye on the door for her father's entrance and the other on the mirror, or rather with both eyes at one moment on the door and immediately afterward on the mirror—a movement which displayed their brilliancy and depth—she went on enumerating to her suitor the material difficulties that made their engagement so hopeless.