"Well," said Peter, with a levity he was far from feeling, "if the drifting was imperceptible, you naturally wouldn't see it, you know!"
"You might have spared a joke at such a time as this!" she cried, indignantly.
"I—I wasn't aware there was a close time for jokes," he said, humbly; "not that it was much of a joke!"
"Indeed it was not," she replied. "But oh, Peter, how we have both drifted!"
"Have we?" he exclaimed, blankly. "I—I mean—haven't we?"
"I was so blind—so wilfully, foolishly blind! I told myself we were friends!"
"Surely we are?" he said, retaking possession of her hand; he had entirely forgotten Sophia in the ironmongery department, at Tottenham Court Road. "I—I understood we were on that footing?"
"No," she said; "let us have no subterfuges any more—we must look facts in the face. After what we have both said to-night, we can no longer deceive ourselves by words.... Peter," she broke off suddenly, "I am going to ask you a question, and on your answer my fate—and yours too, perhaps—will depend! Tell me truthfully...." Her voice failed her for the moment, as she bent over towards him, and clutched his arm tightly in her excitement; her eyes shone with a wild, intense eagerness for his reply.... "Would you——" she repeated....
"Would you have the bottle-jack all brass, or japanned? The brass ones are a shilling more."
Peter gave a violent start, for the voice in which this most incongruous and irrelevant question was put was that of Sophia!