En route to the station there had been an opportunity to weigh the pros and the cons of the matter in her cool and sagacious mind. All the same, it was not coolness nor was it sagacity that had carried the day with her. She liked this young man because she liked him. He was the new, highly efficient type the war had evolved. She knew nothing about him, but instinctively she would trust this man as she would trust few men when it came to a tight place. And there was an air of romance about him.
It was an act of foolhardiness, no doubt, for a girl of position, but she had been made reckless by recent events. Besides, she was “out” for freedom. She had had one brief taste of it, and making due allowance for its drawbacks, her appetite was keen for more. Irksome the experiences of the last ten days had certainly been, yet she was quite determined now to do as she chose with her own life. She asked nothing highfalutin’ nor did she look for it, but she meant, if possible, to escape altogether from the stuffy circle of Castle Carabbas with its hierarchical connections and its feudal ideas. Now was the moment for those autocratic people, her father and mother, to learn once for all the limit of their power.
As there was no one else on the Down platform, they were able to seal the compact in the fashion ordained by nature and custom. “But, do you know,” the young man confessed even at this delicious moment, “if you hadn’t been so much up against it I mightn’t have had the pluck to ask you.”
Such naïveté delighted her. Also, it was very intriguing.
“But why not?” she archly inquired. “I’m only a friendless governess, am I not, with food and house-room provided and a wage of thirty pounds a year?”
“Yes, you are down on your luck,” he frankly admitted. “But I don’t mind betting a shilling that you haven’t been so always. Now tell me honestly, haven’t you once been Top Dog?”
She didn’t try to conceal her amusement even if she masked a proper feminine curiosity. “I don’t know why you should think so,” she said with the smile provocative which yet was a counterfeit of complete indifference.
“There’s something about you”—his naïveté was charming—“that is always giving you away. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was your first situation.”
“But didn’t you say the other day”—she would have been less than her sex had she not enjoyed drawing him out—“that you thought I had been abroad in the service of foreign royalties?”
“I’ve had all sorts of theories about you,” he confessed. “But it won’t surprise me at all if none of them meets the case.”