‘I have cancelled the notice I gave them,’ he said. ‘You will not have the pleasure of seeing the club furniture coming out into the street.’
‘Well, indeed! You are much too kind to them after what they did to you, Thomas. I am sorry you did that; they deserved a good slap to serve them out.’
An awful spirit of raillery seized the unfortunate woman. She would say something lightly and humorously, just to show she had nothing but goodwill towards Miss Propert; it should be quite in that felicitous comedy-style which had made the business of the slippers such a success.
‘Ah, but now I remember that Miss Propert did not want you to give them notice,’ she said. ‘Now we can guess why you took it back again. Oh, not a word more. I am discretion itself.’
Even this did not hurt him. He was rather amused than otherwise.
‘Trust you for hitting the nail on the head, Emmeline,’ he said. ‘That was why.’
Lady Keeling rose in great good humour. Once, she remembered, her husband had been very rude when she made a little joke about his regard for Miss Propert. She had hit the nail on the head then, too, for no doubt there was something (ever so little) of truth in what she said, and it had ‘touched him up.’ But now he did not mind: that showed that there was no truth in it at all now. She had never thought there was anything serious, for Thomas was not that sort of man (and who should know better than she?), but perhaps he had been a little attracted. She was delighted to think that it was certainly all over.
‘Ah, I knew I had guessed,’ she said. ‘And perhaps Miss Propert’s right, for it is always best to be friendly with everybody even if they do behave shabbily. I have always found Miss Propert very sensible and well-behaved, and if she and her brother are coming to see your books on Sunday afternoon, Thomas, and you like to bring them in to tea, you will find me most civil and pleasant to them both. There! And now I think Alice and I will be getting to bed. Dear me, it’s after eleven already. Time flies so, when you are enjoying yourself.’
She gave him a cheerful kiss, she tapped the barometer, and, taking Alice in tow, she left him. Their cheerful voices, talking about the slippers, died away as they went upstairs.
It was not one lark but many that were carolling specks against the blue, as Keeling walked along the ridge of the down next day, to where after an upland mile it dipped into the hollow where he and Norah had met before, and where they would meet again now. The afternoon was warm and windless, and the squalls and showers of yesterday had been translated into the vivider green that clothed the slopes. But all this epiphany of spring that had so kindled his heart before, passed by him to-day quite unobserved: he saw only the tops of the trees, which, climbing up on the sides of the hollow for which he was bound, fringed the edge of the ridge. Soon he had reached that, the track dipped over down the slope, and on each side, between the oak-trunks, and the stumps of the felled hazels, there was spread one continuous sheet of azure, as if the sky had flooded the ground with itself. But he hardly saw that even, for sitting on the bank, where, at the bottom of the hollow, the stream crossed the track, was Norah.