“How can he take you for a fly if you don’t know who he is?”
“Well, I dare say he won’t; quite likely he didn’t mean it; but if he did, he can easily find me at the office. He knew my name, and what paper I was there for. They both knew, which probably accounts for the gentleman with the medals being somewhat ponderous—soldiers are usually snobbish—and he may not have liked having to ride to the station with a newspaper woman.”
“But if the other man was the Lord of the Manor’s brother?”
“Oh, that wouldn’t make any difference. He might very well be less self-important than anything in a bit of scarlet and medals if he had been the Lord of the Manor himself. Why, the Earl of Roxley got tea for me, and was most attentive.”
Doris’s eyes opened wider. She had always secretly entertained rather a superior attitude towards Hal and her sister, and was glad she was not an office clerk. The big, breezy, working world, where the individual is taken on his or her merits apart from birth, or standing, or occupation, was quite unknown to her; and that Hal’s original, attractive personality might open doors for ever shut to her mediocre, pretty young-ladyhood, would never enter her mind.
“I don’t think I should care to talk to any one without being introduced,” she remarked a little affectedly, to which Hal shrugged her shoulders and commented:
“It’s just as well you haven’t to knock about in the world, then. Any one with an ounce of common sense and perspicacity knows when it is safe, and when it is sheer folly.”
Basil watched her with an amused air.
“I’m sure you do,” he said.
“Yes.” She smiled infectiously. “I’ve only once been spoken to unpleasantly in London, after knocking about for seven years, and then I offered the man a sixpence. I said: ‘I’m sorry I haven’t any more, and I can’t spare that, but if you are hungry!...’ He looked as if he would like to slay me, and vanished.”