To-day the work was not heavy, and nearly an hour before the interval for lunch he had finished the dictation of his answers. She knew his business engagements as well as himself, and reminding him that a land-agent was coming to see him at twelve on some private matter, took her papers into the little inner room. Then she came back for her typewriter, which stood on the table in the window where she usually worked, paused and came over to his table.
‘May I speak to you a moment?’ she asked.
‘Certainly, Miss Propert. What is it?’
She fingered the edge of the table, and with her instinct for tidiness, put straight a couple of papers that lay there.
‘It’s about last night,’ she said. ‘I told Charles what had happened, and he doesn’t want me to come up to your house again like that in the evening. He knows as well as I do——’
She broke off, and the trouble cleared from her face, as she looked up at him smiling.
‘Charles wanted to write to you,’ she said, ‘but I said I would really prefer to explain. People are such fools, you know, aren’t they?’
There was mingled chagrin and pleasure for him in this speech. He admired the frank friendliness with which she spoke: but he would have liked to have seen in her some consciousness of the underlying truth which last night he had hugged to himself. But in her frankness there seemed to be a complete unconsciousness of any of his own sentiments, no twitter, however remote, of the bird of romance that had sung to him from the snowy trees.
He assented to the fact that people were fools. ‘But is that the end of my library catalogue?’ he asked.
‘No; I must finish it. I thought perhaps I could go there for an hour in the middle of the morning, when you were down here. I could still get your letters done in time for the evening post. If I went there every day for an hour I could get through as much as I did on alternate evenings.’