She smiled at him with a new light in her eyes, half kind, half ironically roguish. “If I may confess it, there have been times today when I was annoyed with you for being so persistently and indefatigably interested in yourself—for never dreaming of wondering, speculating, inquiring something about me. But that was very weak of me—I see it now—and very wise of you, because—what does it matter about a nobody like me?—but next week the whole world will be bearing witness that you are the most interesting young man in England.”
He gave a swift glance down the train toward the guards noisily shutting the doors. “No, it is too bad,” he said, nervously. “You will always be my first friend in England—my very deeply prized friend everywhere. I know you only to-day—but that day is more to me than all the rest of my life—and it is full of you. They are closing the doors—but you will tell me? The notion of not seeing you again is ridiculous. You are in London—yes?—then how do you think I could come to London without first of all, before everything else, wanting to call upon you?”
“Oh, I daresay we shall meet again,” she answered, as perforce he stepped into the compartment. Her smile had a puzzling quality in it—something compounded, it seemed to him, of both fear and fun. “In a remote kind of way I am mixed up with the story myself.”
There was no time for any hope of further explanation. He put his head out of the window, and shook hands again. “Remember!” he called out fervently. “You are my first friend in England. Whenever—whatever I can do—”
“Even to the half of your kingdom!” she laughed at him, as the movement of the carriage drew him past her.
The tone of these last words, which he bore away with him, had been gay—almost jovial. But the girl, when she had watched him pass out of sight, turned and walked slowly off in the direction of her own train with a white and troubled face.
CHAPTER III
Many builders in their day have put a hand to the making of Caermere Hall. Though there were wide differences of race and language among them and though the long chain of time which binds them together has generations and even centuries for its links, they seem to have had thus much in common: they were all at feud with the sunlight.