“But I, Peter, can be artistic, and also cheat Art by being inartistic;” he placed a tentative foot upon the step, and she anticipated his evident intentions by a careless: “I don’t need you with me to-night.”
—“And then cheat myself by being re-artistic!” he ran alongside the moving train, and secured the door-handle by a deft turn of the wrist. “And I had no intention of coming with you, Peter. Good night!”
... Peter hated him. It struck her that the most poignant ghost of all, and one where she had no hand in the manufacture, would run for ever abreast of a moving train; leap on to the footboard: “I told the man to drive like Hell!”... leap from the footboard: “I had no intention of coming with you——”
And here were the ends of Euston, where the trio had chanted their triumphant ritual; where Peter had once taken her tiger a-walking, and Merle had followed her. Merle....
Blackness now, save for a few splashed lights among a dark huddle of roofs. Then open country.
Yes, she hated Stuart. He might have known that she did rather want him to come. He had known——
Peter smiled. She was mentally framing a letter to him, of which this was the opening phrase: “If you had no intention of coming, why, oh why, did you hold in your hand two first-class tickets to Thatch Lane, when you returned from the booking-office?”
It was just as well, Peter decided, to keep cultivated and alert one’s powers of observation.