“I say,” he murmured—“don’t think me rude—but where do you come in?”
Prudence scrutinised him for a perplexed moment, at a loss for his meaning; whereupon he suggested with a smile:
“Niece, perhaps?”
“Oh!” The gay little laugh, which so irritated Miss Agatha’s ears, broke from her lips once more. “I see. No. I’m Mr Graynor’s youngest daughter... by his second marriage,” she added, with just a hint of malice in her voice.
The young man grasped the position.
“I’m getting hold of it,” he said, a sympathetic light in his eyes. “The thing puzzled me. I couldn’t place you. You don’t seem to fit in.” Then he said with a kind of inspiration, as though the idea had suddenly presented itself to him: “You don’t fit in, you know. Your place rightly is leaning out of a window. That’s how I shall always picture you.”
It was an extraordinary talk, and altogether delightful. Prudence enjoyed his visit tremendously. But when he left, Miss Agatha reproved her sharply for pushing herself forward and monopolising the visitor.
“He monopolised me,” Prudence contended. “I retired into corners, and he followed.”
“You made yourself conspicuous,” Miss Agatha said, “and behaved altogether in a forward and unseemly manner.”
Prudence had occasion later to regret this success in which she had triumphed at the time; Mr Philip Steele had not succeeded in winning general favour, and so never received the invitation to dine. He did not possess sufficient nerve to present himself at the house uninvited, or he would have called again for the pleasure of meeting Prudence. He did meet her, but the encounter was accidental. It was all the more enjoyable on that account. They met where there were neither walls nor interruptions, where they could talk without reserve and laugh unrestrainedly, with only the mating birds to hear them, and the soft wind to catch up and echo their mirth in the tall trees overhead—a joyous meeting, with the springtime harmony about them, and the springtime gladness in their hearts and eyes.