She swept a glance of outrage and pain from Christian’s troubled face to the figure on the box; caught the earnest gaze of a pair of bright brown eyes, then plunged into the traffic and was gone. Christian watched her disappear before he climbed back miserably, and Slinker’s wife shook the reins lightly, and proceeded down the full thoroughfare.
“That was a mistake!” she said, nodding cheerfully here and there to a well-known face. “You can’t have been very tactful, Christian, my child. But anyway it was a mistake, and I’d no business to suggest it. Still, we’ll do it yet, see if we don’t! Trust Nettie Stone for that!”
She drove on gently, smiling, very sure of herself; but at the corner of Redman Street the horses swerved without just cause, as if the hand on the reins had tightened unawares. Dixon of Dockerneuk was standing on the pavement, and he raised his eyes as she passed above him—Stanley Lyndesay’s widow. She laid her hand on Christian’s arm as he stared worriedly at his boots, and he looked up quickly, wondering at the shake in her voice.
“Laker dear,” she was saying with a smile, “I rather think Slinker was a mistake, too!”
CHAPTER III
The third thing that Verity dropped, that morning, was three pounds of salmon, right in Deborah’s blindly-descending path. She knew Deborah wouldn’t step on anything as squishy as salmon.
“I want to ask your opinion about something,” she said, leaving the salmon barrier-wise on the pavement, “so come along to the café, and be asked it like a lamb. It’s no use pretending that I’ve got scarlet fever or a new hat, or anything of that kind that you simply can’t be seen with, because I’m thoroughly bored with my own society, and I mean to have yours.”
“You want to pat me,” Deborah said fiercely, looking at her hardly with reddened eyes, “and I won’t have it! I won’t! I won’t!”
“How terribly limited you are!” Verity sighed pityingly. “I want to talk to you solely and entirely about myself. Otherwise, why should I pick you up in the pig-market on a Saturday morning, when you have pointedly cut me three times this week?”
“I shall hold you to that, if I come!” Deborah yielded weakly to the hidden strength in the demure little figure before her. “And, mind, at the first pat—I go!”