“I have to get back to the city,” he explained patiently, “We’re going out to the country to-morrow.”
Miss Evison wasn’t used to disappointments and they made her temper very uncertain.
“Are you taking Miss Macdonald with you?” she inquired.
“Yes.” He seemed modestly proud that she should guess it.
She was ashamed the minute the question was out, but that he should fail to resent it was maddening, and when she was angry she forgot to be elegant. She was smiling in a way that was not beautiful, and she said:
“You know I wouldn’t have thought from the exalted opinion of her you used to have, that she’d have fallen for the soldier stuff.”
There was nothing gratifying to her vanity in the way he looked at her. He was angry, of course, but more evident was the surprise of disillusionment. It seemed as though for the first time he saw her as she was and hated to believe it.
“You don’t mean that, honest?” he said. He put his big toil-hardened hand on her shoulder, very gently. It was a rather remarkable hand, strong and capable and intelligent looking, and it had steadied many other people to be honest,
but it was unthinkable that he should presume to take such an attitude of fatherly disappointment in her conduct. So she looked at the hand until he took it away, and she said good night with as much dignity as the situation and her temper would allow.
She was still in this frame of mind when she met Dr. Knight a few minutes later, but then she was beginning to know Dr. Knight pretty well by this time, and it was impossible to avoid such things constantly.