“Who the devil would have thought that the chap had it in him?”
As for young Wingfield, he was nearly as much puzzled by the issue of his interview with Mr. Dunning as that gentleman was himself. When Dunning had left the house Jack hurried to the breakfast-room, whistling an uncertain air. The butler blew out the spirit lamp that heated the breakfast dishes, and laid the latter on the table, with the coffee. But the moment he had left the room, Jack Wingfield put his hands in his pockets and walked away from the breakfast table to one of the windows, and, standing with his legs apart, stared out, allowing his omelette to get chilled and the coffee milk to get a surface on it. Jack Wingfield was also puzzled to account for all that had occurred. Dunning had always occupied in his mind a place of the deepest respect; and his attainments he had been accustomed to think of with something little less than awe. And yet he had been able within twenty-four hours to discover his gross incompetence and, moreover, to tell him of it, and to send him away with no more ceremony than he had thought necessary to employ in clearing out Farmer Verrall and his greyhounds!
The whole thing was too wonderful to be grasped immediately by such an intellect as his. It required a deal of thinking out; so he stood at the window staring at the garden for several minutes.
At last he too thought that he might make a brief summary of the situation and its development up to that moment. He whirled round and gazed at the breakfast things. Then he removed his hands from his pockets, and doubling up his right struck the palm of his left vigorously, saying:
“By the Lord Harry! She has made a man of me!”
CHAPTER XVII
When he told her that his mother would be greatly pleased if she would pay her a visit, her face became roseate. She hesitated before answering him. She had usually her wits about her, and rarely failed to see in a moment the end of a matter of which the beginning was suggested to her; but now everything before her was blurred. She could not utter even the merest commonplace word in response.
Three days before she had seen that sudden light come into his eyes when she had been trying—and not without success—to make him think better of himself than he had been disposed to think, and she had felt startled. She had gone home with that look impressed upon her. What did it mean? She knew very well what it meant That is to say, she knew very well that it meant that he was in love with her—for the moment, yes, for the moment; and that was by no means the same as knowing all that it meant. For instance, she could not tell if it meant that he would be in love with her the next day and the day after. She did not know if it meant that he would ask her to marry him, in the face of the opposition of his family—she assumed the opposition of his family, just as she assumed also that it was unnecessary for her to take into consideration the possibility of his being influenced by what the people of Framsby would say. He would of course snap his fingers at Framsby, but his family was a very different matter. She wondered if he would be strong enough to ask her in the face of his family. She was not quite sure of him in this respect. One sees the effect that her experience of men and their professions of love had upon her. She had been made thoughtful, guarded, determined to refrain from allowing a second man to make a fool of her—determined to do her best to repress all her own feelings in the matter before it would be too late to attempt to do so—before she had seen what his falling in love with her would lead to. That was why she had gone away so suddenly on the first day they had met on the tennis ground, and that was why she had taken the trouble to keep beside her friends on the other days: she wished to give herself every chance—to keep herself perfectly free in regard to him, so that, should nothing come of the little flame which she saw flicker up behind the look that he had given her, she would not have a lasting disappointment.