“Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; she was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was passionately in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of his divinity, shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have charmed her, who, being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in short trousers. It didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than satisfaction at a good job well done. This was his first, his freshest love, but she cared only that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. He saw her face, idealized her face and gloried in her face: she saw a wedding-ring, she was to be Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home of Peter Struggles. Both had their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved Ada, and Ada only loved herself.
“Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of him—and used it.
She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I do not want you to. Only——”
“Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at the Hall?”
“Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of a delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and if you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed him, languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund courtship—once Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see Peter, and she relaxed her standard so far as to take his arm down the drive of Heaton Park. Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where they were hidden, he had an arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and his head was with the stars.
Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show it after church to-morrow.”
CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR
ON general grounds—on the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety—Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She had not much doubt that Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though not so readily as she had anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement ring at church next day for the reason that she had none to exhibit. Peter kept Sam too late for that.