"Well, and not disliking—hating!" she cried, drawing her hand sharply away from his.
"I would rather you hated me than that you were indifferent—extremes meet. You will come to my uncle's, will you not, Miss Grahame?"
"Extremes meet, but we need not!" she returned, with a sudden school-girl pertness, which made him burst out laughing. Before he had recovered his gravity she had dashed past him through the park gate, and in a few minutes' time had arrived, breathless, before the doors of 21, Queen Mary Crescent.
Up to her own room she ran as soon as Susan opened the front door.
"I declare," she exclaimed, as she saw her blushing face in the glass, "I look like a jubilant nursemaid who has just parted from her 'young man'! And so I have, I suppose; but the odd part of it is that I don't seem to feel afraid of him now. I even have a sort of sneaking regard for him—almost a liking, it might be called, if I didn't know what a fearfully bad man he is. He must be a marvellously clever actor, for he doesn't look in the least cruel or callous, or like a forger or drunkard or bully. I remember I always thought that he was very handsome, and that he had the most beautiful blue eyes. I suppose he must have come right over to England when I disappeared, and persuaded his uncle to forgive him, and reformed. He half-recognised me as soon as he saw me; but he doesn't realise that growing up and putting my hair up have altered me just as shaving his moustache and having his hair out have altered him. He must know the truth sooner or later, I suppose, and then—will he be glad or sorry, I wonder? Now, of course, he makes love to any girl he pleases, knowing quite well that he is safely married, though nobody suspects it. But if I were to turn upon him in a majestic way and say, 'Sir, I am your wife already!' he wouldn't perhaps be quite so pleased. And, by-the-bye, in all his talk he never committed himself by mentioning marriage, which was very artful of him!"
CHAPTER XIII.
In spite of Wallace Armstrong's entreaties, Laline could not alter her arrangement not to make the acquaintance of Alexander Wallace; for when Mrs. Vandeleur fixed upon the following Wednesday as the afternoon on which she would call at the bank, the young secretary had already announced to her employer her wish to remain at home.
"You are very right," the little lady had observed, "to avoid Mr. Armstrong if his society is uncongenial to you. Those strong instincts of liking and of hating are given to us women as safeguards. Although to my mind Mr. Armstrong is wholly sympathetic, if a secret voice tells you to beware of him, it is that of some beneficent spirit of the so-called dead, who see with fleshless eyes through the fleshly veil into the soul, and know that this man's society would be in some way harmful to you."