"I won't come to the door; better not, perhaps," he said, and his words sent a sudden feeling of chill through her. They seemed to have fallen back into the conventional attitude again, the most appropriate one, probably, for Edgware Road, but none the less depressing on that account.
"You are not going to be sad, now?" he added, half guessing her thoughts. She looked up in his face and made an effort to be bright.
"It has been beautiful all the time," she said. "I never knew anything could be so beautiful before."
"Ah," he said, smiling back; "it is the first day of your first holidays, you see. We will do it again some day." But she knew as he spoke that they never could do it again.
She saw him occasionally during the Easter holidays. He sent for her once about a pupil he had managed to procure her, and once about some drawing-room lectures he tried to arrange for her, and which fell through. But on both these occasions he was in his silent mood, and she came away infected by his dulness. Then she met him one day in the neighbourhood of Queen's Crescent, and they had a few minutes conversation in the noise and bustle of the street, that left her far happier than she had been after a tête-à-tête in his chambers.
She went home for a few days at the end of her holidays, but her visit was not altogether a success. It was a shock to her to find that home was no longer the same now that she had once left it; and she did not quite realise that the change was in herself as much as in those she had left behind her. Her father had grown accustomed to living without her, and it hurt her pride to find that she was no longer indispensable to him. Her old occupations seemed gone, and there was no time to substitute new ones; she told herself bitterly that she had no place in her own home, and that she had burnt her ships when she went out to make herself a new place in the world. Ivingdon seemed narrower in its sympathies and duller than ever; she wondered how people could go on living with so few ideas in their minds, and so few topics of conversation; even the Rector irritated her by his want of interest in her experiences and by his utter absorption in his own concerns. Miss Esther added to her feeling of strangeness by treating her with elaborate consideration; she would have given anything to be scolded instead, for being profane, or for lying on the hearthrug. But they persisted in regarding her as a child no longer; and she felt graver and more responsible at home, than she had done all the time she was working for her living in London.
On the whole, she was glad when school began again; and she grew much happier when she found herself once more engrossed in the term's work, which had now increased very materially, owing to her own efforts as well as to those of Paul. Of him, she only had occasional glimpses during the next few weeks; but they were enough to keep their friendship warm, and she soon found herself scribbling little notes to him, when she had anything to tell,—generally about some small success of hers which she felt obliged to confide to some one, and liked best of all to confide to him. Sometimes he did not answer them; and she sighed, and took the hint to write no more for a time. And sometimes he wrote back one of his ceremonious replies, which she had learnt to welcome as the most characteristic thing he could have sent her; for, in his letters, Paul never lost his formality. It was a very satisfactory friendship on both sides, with enough familiarity to give it warmth, and not enough to make it disquieting. But it received an unexpected check towards the middle of June, through an incident that was slight enough in itself, though sufficient to set both of them thinking. And to stop and think in the course of a friendship, especially when it is between a man and a woman, is generally the forerunner of a misunderstanding.
It was the first hot weather that year. May had been disappointingly cold and wet, after the promise of the month before, but June came in with a burst of sunshine that lasted long enough to justify the papers in talking about the drought. On one of the first fine days, Paul was lazily smoking in his arm-chair after a late breakfast, when a knock at his outer door roused him unpleasantly from a reverie that had threatened to become a nap; and he rose slowly to his feet with something like a muttered imprecation. Then he remembered that he had left the door open for the sake of the draught, and he shouted a brief "Come in," and sank back again into his chair. A light step crossed the threshold, and paused close behind him.
"Who's there?" asked Paul, without moving.
"Well, you are cross. And on a morning like this, too!"