As he spoke, Elma’s eye, following his hand while it moved, chanced to fall suddenly on the name of the station printed on the ticket with which he was pointing. She gave a sharp little start.
“Warnworth!” she cried, flushing up, with some slight embarrassment in her voice; “why, that’s ever so far back. We’re long past Warnworth. We ran by it three or four stations behind; in fact, it’s the next place to Chetwood, where I got in at.”
Cyril Waring looked up with a half-guilty smile as embarrassed as her own.
“Oh yes,” he said quietly. “I knew that quite well. I’m down here often. It’s half-way between Chetwood and Warnworth I’m painting. But I thought—well, if you’ll excuse me saying it, I thought I was so comfortable and so happy where I was, that I might just as well go on a station or two more, and then pay the difference, and take the next train back to Warnworth. You see,” he added, after a pause, with a still more apologetic and penitent air, “I saw you were so interested in—well, in snakes, you know, and pictures.”
Gentle as he was, and courteous, and perfectly frank with her, Elma, nevertheless, felt really half inclined to be angry at this queer avowal. That is to say, at least, she knew it was her bounden duty, as an English lady, to seem so; and she seemed so accordingly with most Britannic severity. She drew herself up in a very stiff style, and stared fixedly at him, while she began slowly and steadily to uncoil Sardanapalus from her imprisoned arm with profound dignity.
“I’m sorry I should have brought you so far out of your way,” she said, in a studied cold voice—though that was quite untrue, for, as a matter of fact, she had enjoyed their talk together immensely. “And besides, you’ve been wasting your valuable time when you ought to have been painting. You’ll hardly get any work done now at all this morning. I must ask you to get out at the very next station.”
The young man bowed with a crestfallen air. “No time could possibly be wasted,” he began, with native politeness, “that was spent—” Then he broke off quite suddenly. “I shall certainly get out wherever you wish,” he went on, more slowly, in an altered voice; “and I sincerely regret if I’ve unwittingly done anything to annoy you in any way. The fact is, the talk carried me away. It was art that misled me. I didn’t mean, I’m sure, to obtrude myself upon you.”
And even as he spoke they whisked, unawares, into the darkness of a tunnel.