"It wouldn't have made any difference if I had been staying at Uncle Creddle's. They wouldn't want company at this time of night," she answered, peering up at him uneasily through the starry twilight.
"Carrie!" He held her closer, his thin, boyish arms trembling a little. "I wish to goodness we could have a home of our own. There's some houses going to be built in that field there. I wish we could apply for one of them."
"Well, we can't," said Caroline, touched by some wistful tone in the lad's voice to a deeper tenderness for him than she had hitherto known. "We have nothing to get married on. People would only laugh at us."
"But you wish it, same as me, Carrie? If I was one of them rich young chaps that can plank down the money for a half-year's rent and a mahog'ny suite, like I do for a packet of cigs., you'd be ready to get married, Carrie?"
It was the first time they had seriously talked of marriage, though they had been "going together" ever since Caroline knew that a 'boy' was as essential to her grown-up panoply as hairpins, and she felt something indefinable at the back of her mind which was not pleasure; and yet it was not fear—— She turned from her own emotions with a sort of relief. "Goodness! There's the church clock striking a quarter to eleven. We must have been three-quarters of an hour coming from the prom. here. I know Miss Ethel goes to bed at ten, and she'll have been sitting up for me."
"Never mind. You're only stopping to oblige. They ought to be jolly thankful to you, whatever time you turn up," babbled Wilf—all impatient excitement. "Carrie, just one more. I must——"
He clung to her, then let her go. She ran up the path towards the house while he stood there, listening to her footsteps and yet restraining himself from following her, as a matter of course. For the idea of running after her and holding her in his arms by force, as he wanted to do, simply never entered his mind. Despite that dark lane and the evening hour, the chivalry of the ordinary decent Anglo-Saxon man—which some races are unable to understand—stood like a sentinel at the door of his desires.
Caroline entered the door of the Cottage in a state of hurry and excitement; but the empty kitchen seemed to act on it like a sort of emotional cold douche. The varnished walls, the neatly set chairs, the clock ticking so loudly above the mantel-shelf, all seemed somehow unnatural, with the unnaturalness of empty houses where steps go echoing—echoing—though nobody is there.
She hastily put the kettle on the gas-ring, then prepared a glass for Miss Ethel's hot water and two cups for Mrs. Bradford's cocoa and her own. But as the water would not boil all at once she stood there watching the little blue and yellowish flames of that unsatisfactory Thorhaven gas splutter under the kettle. All sorts of thoughts went scurrying about her mind as the clock measured the seconds—tick-tock! tick-tock!—over her head.
How silly of Wilf to begin to talk about marrying at all. But, of course, if you were engaged—only she and Wilf weren't engaged. They'd been "going together," of course, but she had no ring. She had never considered herself really engaged. Neither had Aunt Creddle——