"So you say. But one never knows."
She was honestly unhappy at the idea of his leaving her, and Henry, when he understood this, felt his heart rise a little in sympathy—the swelling had gone down since we last saw them together. But he did not guess that he was pleased rather by the flattering thought that she would miss him, than softened by the sentiment of leaving her behind him.
"After all," he said, "I'm not away yet."
"It's that horrid Puddy—what-you-call-him—that's to blame for stuffing your head with ideas of throwing up such a good post as you have. Take my advice, Henry, stay where you are, for a while at any rate. There's a dear, good fellow!"
But the dear, good fellow kissed Flo somewhat frigidly when he parted from her that night, and decided that Adrian Grant was right in his estimate of women as creatures who, in the mass, had no ideas beyond social comfort, no ambition higher than "society," and who were only interested in the projects of men to the extent these might advance their own selfish desires.
"She said I never considered her. By Jove, I could wish I did not," Henry reflected, biting his moustache savagely in his mood of discontent. "I wonder what P. would think of her?"
When a man wonders what another would think of his sweetheart it is a cloudy day for the latter. When the man hesitates, the woman is lost.
Mr. P. had never encountered Miss Winton; but a few days after the frosty episode in her love-story, Henry and his friend met Flo in the market-place, and stopping, she was introduced. This not without qualms to Henry, who could scarce avoid the meeting, and was yet loth to present his friend to Flo, in view of her expressed dislike for him. But the ready courtesy and charming manner of the author-musician seemed to please her, and to Henry's surprise, her eyes, her smiles, were more for Mr. P. than for himself. She could be most attractive when she liked, this young lady who had called his friend "horrid," and was absurdly opposed to his dream of London. Henry did not know whether to be pleased or disappointed at the bearing of Miss Winton. He was glad she had not been cold to Mr. P., hurt that she was pleasant—so superfluously pleasant. On the whole, he was irritated, uneasy.
Something in the manner of his friend contributed to this result. Not a word had been spoken in the short conversation on the pavement of the old market-place to awaken or enliven doubt or jealousy, but there was an indefinable something in Mr. P.'s manner to Flo, and his remarks when they parted from her, to indicate that he had not been favourably impressed.
A year or two ago happiness seemed such an easy thing—so simple, so difficult to escape—that by contrast, Henry's present state of querulous unrest put it as far away as a fog removes the wonted position of a prominent landmark. He had an inclination to kick somebody—himself, deservedly. Could Flo be right about settling down in Laysford, where he was a potential "somebody"? Suppose he had an opportunity to go to London now, should he take it? If the man who wrote as Adrian Grant had unsettled his mind so far as his old simple faith in God's goodness and mercy was concerned, and Stratford and Wheelton and Laysford together had muddied his pictures of journalism, and even Flo had clouded his thoughts of happiness, what was worth while? Might London be all he had painted it? Was it to be "never glad, confident morning again"?