Helen replied, puzzled: "I don't know. Tell me."
"Clare!" he cried, with boisterous enthusiasm. "It's Clare!"
Then he remembered that he had never called her Clare before; always it had been Miss Harrington. And yet the name had come so easily and effortlessly to his tongue!
Helen gasped: "Clare! Is it you, Clare?"
And Clare advanced through the shadows and kissed Helen very simply and quietly. Again Speed felt that strange, presaging emotion of something about to happen, of some train being laid for the future. The rain was now a torrent, and the wind a great gale shrieking across the fenlands.
Helen said: "I'm drenched with rain—let me take my coat off." After a short pause she added: "Why didn't you let me know you were coming, Clare? If you had I could have stayed in for you."
III
Speed was always inclined to drop out of conversations that were proceeding well enough without him. In a few moments Helen and Clare were chatting together exactly as if he had not been present. He did not mind; he was rather glad, in fact, because it relieved him from the task of mastering his nervousness. He felt too, what he always felt when Helen was talking to another woman; a feeling that women as a sex were hostile to men, and that when they were together there was a sort of secret freemasonry between them which enforced a rigid and almost contemptuous attitude towards the other sex. Nothing in Clare's manner encouraged this belief, but Helen's side of the conversation was a distinct suggestion of it. Not that anything said or discussed was inimical to him; merely that whenever the conversation came near to a point at which he might naturally have begun to take part in it, Helen seemed somehow to get hold of it by the neck and pull it out of his reach. And Clare was quite impassive, allowing Helen to do just what she liked. These were Speed's perhaps exaggerated impressions as he sat very uncomfortably in the armchair, almost frightened to move lest movement on his part might be wrongly interpreted as irritation, fear, or boredom. When he felt uncomfortable his discomfort was always added to by a usually groundless fear that other people were noticing it and speculating as to its reason.
At six the bell rang for school tea in the dining-hall, and this was his week to superintend that function. Most mercifully then he was permitted to leave the red-glowing drawing-room and scamper across the rain-swept quadrangle. "Sorry I must leave you," he said, hastily, rising from his chair. Helen said, as if her confirmation were essential before his words could be believed: "It's his week for reading grace, you know."
"And after that I've got some youngsters with piano-lessons," he said, snatching up his gown and, in his nervousness, putting it on wrong side out. "So I'll say good-bye, Miss Harrington."