“I shall be delighted.”
“I’ll get Lady Jennings to lend me the victoria to-morrow, and meet you outside Lyons’ tea room at four. Will that do?”
She spoke with the air of an angry empress, cold, reserved, with a suggestion of suppressed thunder in look and voice. Gerard went away in a state of bewilderment impossible to describe.
Not only was he now quite sure that it was she whom he had seen in the crowd, but he knew that she had the strongest possible objection to its being known that she led a double life. He could not understand it. If she had been a clever “sensational” journalist, with subjects to work up by actual observation, as he had at first supposed, there was no reason in the world why she should not have confessed the fact to him. Although he was not an intimate friend of hers, she knew him quite well enough for an ordinary girl to feel sure that he could be trusted with a paltry little secret such as that. It was true that she might naturally prefer to keep her own counsel to her friends on such a point: old ladies would certainly feel nervous about such an undertaking on the part of a handsome young girl as the passing under a disguise.
But when she was found out, and by a man, surely common sense ought to have suggested to her that confession was the only safe course! If she had told him simply that she wore a disguise in the course of her professional pursuits, and had begged him to keep her little secret, she might have been sure of his delighted acquiescence, and of his satisfaction in the thought that he knew something about her which she wished to keep unknown to the world in general.
Considering the high level of her intelligence, Gerard was greatly surprised and disturbed at her obstinacy.
But he told himself that she would certainly be more open on the following day, and that she would tell him, if not all the truth, at least enough to endeavor to engage his loyalty in keeping her secret.
Yet in spite of these reflections, Gerard felt that there was still something ugly about what he had seen. That passing of the flashing stone to an unknown man, and then the prompt disappearance of the two persons! What was he to think of that? What would she say when he told her, pointblank, as he meant to do, that that was what he saw?
There was all the time underlying his admiration for this beautiful, spirited girl, a sickening horror of what might be in store for him when he should learn all the truth. It was not, could not be possible that she was a common thief, that the money she earned was made by practices of absolute dishonesty. And yet, the longer he lingered upon the circumstances, the more he thought about that interview with Rachel that afternoon, the more he wondered whether there was something horrible, something dishonorable about the whole affair.
That she was not a designer or artist he was by this time quite sure: every circumstance confirmed him in his opinion. No artist worthy the name can live long without a pencil in his hand; yet no one appeared ever to have seen her at this mysterious work which brought in eight hundred a year!