“Wot’s he bin up to now, I wonder,” Moggridge panted to himself—for the second pair of feet belonged to him. “Shamming nose-bleed and sending me in for an ’andkerchief, and then sneaking off here by ’isself!”
“What a time you’ve been,” said Mr Beveridge, slipping the purse with its contents into his pocket. “I was so infernally cold I had to take a little walk. Got the handkerchief?”
In silence and with a suspicious solemnity Moggridge handed him the handkerchief, and they turned back for the house.
“Now for a balloon,” Mr Beveridge reflected.
Certainly it was cold. The frost nipped sharp that night, and next morning there were ice gardens on the windows, and the park lay white all through the winter sunshine.
By evening the private lake was reported to be bearing, and the next day it hummed under the first skaters. Hardly necessary to say Mr Beveridge was among the earliest of them, or that he was at once the object of general admiration and envy. He traced “vines” and “Q’s,” and performed wonderful feats on one leg all [pg 48] morning. At lunch he was in the best of spirits, and was off again at once to the ice.
When he reached the lake in the afternoon the first person he spied was Lady Alicia, and five minutes afterwards they were sailing off together hand in hand.
“I knew you would come to-day,” he remarked.
“How could you have known? It was by the merest chance I happened to come.”
“It has always been by the merest chance that any of them have ever come.”