She was much pleased with herself as she walked home; and even the bustle of Edgware Road and the squalor of Queen's Crescent failed to remove the pleasant impression that her excursion into the fashionable world had left with her. It comforted her wounded feelings to discover that she could hold her own in a room full of people, although the only man whose opinion she valued held her of no more account than a child.
"Hullo! you seem pleased with yourself," said Polly Newland, as she entered the house. The cockney twang of her voice struck un-musically on Katharine's ear, and she murmured some sort of ungracious reply and turned to rummage in the box for letters. There was one for her, and the sight of the precise, upright handwriting drove every thought of Polly, and the Keeleys, and her pleasant afternoon out of her head. Even then something kept her from reading it at once, and she took it upstairs into her cubicle, and laid it on the table while she changed her clothes and elaborately folded up her best ones and put them away. Then she sat down on the bed and tore it open with trembling fingers, and tried to cheat herself into the belief that she was perfectly indifferent as to its contents.
"Dear child," it ran:—
What has become of you? Come round and have tea with me to-morrow afternoon. I have some new books to show you.
Yours ever,
Paul Wilton.
Here at last was the opportunity she had wanted. He should know now that she was not a child, to be laughed at because she was cross, to be ignored when she was hurt, and to be coaxed back into good humour again by a bribe. She would be able to show him now that she was not the sort of woman he seemed to consider her, and she told herself several times that she was overjoyed at being given the chance of telling him so. But when it came to the point, she found that the cold, dignified letter she had been composing for weeks was not so easy to write; and she spent the rest of the evening in thinking of new ones. First of all, it was to be very short, and very stiff; but that was not obvious enough to gratify her injured feelings, and she set to work on another one that was mainly sarcastic. But sarcasm seemed a sorry weapon to use when she had reached such a crisis in her life as this; and she thought of another one in bed, after the light was out, in which she determined that he should know she was unhappy as well. And this one was so pathetic that it even roused her own pity, and she felt that it would be positively inhuman to send such a letter as that to any one, however badly he had behaved.
In the end, she did not write to him at all. It was more effective, she thought, to remain silent. So she went to school the next morning as usual, and gave her lessons as usual; though she looked in the glass at intervals to see if she were pale and had a sad expression, which certainly ought to have been the case. But even her head did not ache, which it did sometimes; and Nature obstinately refused to come to her assistance. She reached home again about four o'clock, and the aspect of the doorsteps and the area completed her discomfiture. If they had only been a little less squalid, a little more free from the domination of cats, she might have retained her dignified attitude to the end. But there was something about them to-day that recalled the cosy little room in the Temple by vivid contrast; and she flung her pile of exercise books recklessly upon the hall table, and hastened out of the house again, without allowing herself time to think.
"I was afraid you were not coming," he said, and he greeted her with both hands. She never remembered seeing him so unreserved in his welcome before; and she marvelled at herself for having attempted to keep away from him any longer.
"It was because of the cats," she said, laughing to hide her emotion. But she could not hide anything from him; he knew something of what she was thinking, and he bent down and deliberately kissed her.