“Then let us hope that he will marry the right person. People sometimes do, you know.”
She smiled with a strange little flicker of the eyelids. They had grown wonderfully accustomed to each other during the last three weeks. Here, it would appear, was one of those friendships between man and woman that occasionally set the world agog with curiosity and scepticism. But there seemed to be no doubt about it. He was over thirty, she verging on that prosaic age. Both had lived and moved in the world; to both life was an open book, and they had probably discovered, as most of us do, that the larger number of the leaves are blank. He had almost told her that he was engaged to be married, and she had quite understood. There could not possibly be any misapprehension; there was no room for one of those little mistakes about which people write novels and fondly hope that some youthful reader may be carried away by a very faint resemblance to that which they hold to be life. Moreover, at thirty, one leaves the first romance of youth behind.
There was something in her smile that suggested that she did not quite believe in his cynicism.
“Also,” she said gravely, “some stronger influence might appear—an influence which I could not counteract.”
Jack Meredith turned in his long chair and looked at her searchingly.
“I have a vague idea,” he said, “that you are thinking of Durnovo.”
“I am,” she admitted, with some surprise. “I wonder how you knew? I am afraid of him.”
“I can reassure you on that score,” said Meredith. “For the next two years or so Durnovo will be in daily intercourse with me. He will be under my immediate eye. I did not anticipate much pleasure from his society. But now I do.”
“Why?” she asked, rather mystified.
“Because I shall have the daily satisfaction of knowing that I am relieving you of an anxiety.”