“Neither had I,” she said. “It was not exactly voluntary.”
“You don’t mean,” he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her perplexedly. “I’ve wondered,” he added somewhat lamely after a pause, “since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night? It wasn’t, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your post?”
She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious he had ever heard. He laughed with her.
“Oh Lord!” he said. “Don’t tell me it was that.”
“Mrs Graham waited up for me,” she confessed, “and the others got back first and admitted I hadn’t gone with them. She was—oh! so angry... There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured me my present position at the café. It helped at the time, but of course it’s a step down.”
“It’s a drop, yes,” he admitted. “I’m awfully sorry. You must climb again. Life is always; climbing.”
“It is easier to drop a step than to climb one,” she returned.
“That isn’t your philosophy really,” he insisted. “I know you have encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It’s up to you to practise what you preach.”
“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. “I must have been a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that.”
“You were never priggish,” he asserted. “But you keep a man up to the mark.”