Helen laughed.
“You don’t look as if any grief particularly weighed on you,” she said.
“Clearly not now,” said he.
This was a little clumsily obvious, and it made her for the moment slightly embarrassed. She dabbed a label somewhat crooked on to the back of a work about missionary enterprise.
“Can you write a legible hand, Lord Yorkshire?” she said. “If so, and if you will be kind enough, please write ‘Sunday Magazine’ very clearly on twelve labels, with ordinal numbers, one to twelve, below the title. And when I’ve pasted them on, I shall have finished, and we’ll go out. Martin isn’t here, I am afraid. He is up at Cambridge till the end of the month.”
Frank obediently took a pen. He had suffered a slight repulse.
“A notable charm of life,” he remarked, “is its extreme unexpectedness. If I had been told by a chiromantist that I should shortly be writing the words ‘Sunday Magazine’—is that legible enough?—twelve times over with numerals beneath I should have distrusted everything else he said. Yet, here we go.”
Helen laughed. She was not quite certain whether she was pleased or not at the success with which she had turned the conversation on to topics so alien from herself as the “Sunday Magazine.”
“Quite so,” she said. “And if I had been told that I should be telling you to do so, I should have considered it too wildly improbable to be even funny. Yet, as you say, here we go. Oh!”
Her ear had caught the sound of a step outside, and with a quick sweep of her arm she threw her cigarette out of the window.