For a passing second she felt a wave of indignation against him surge up in her heart. This, however, she passionately suppressed, with the instinctive desire of a woman who is sacrificing herself to feel the object of such sacrifice worthy of what is offered.
It was not long before she reached the gate of Mr. Quincunx’s garden. Yes,—there he was—with his wheel-barrow and his hoe—bending over his potatoes. She opened the gate and walked quite close up to him before he observed her. He greeted her in his usual manner, with a smile of half-cynical, half-affectionate welcome, and taking her by the hand as he might have taken a child, he led her to the one shady spot in his garden, where, under a weeping ash, he had constructed a rough bench.
“I didn’t expect you,” he said, when they were seated. “I never do expect you. People like me who have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy themselves in don’t expect visitors. They count the hours which are left to them before the night comes.”
“But you have Sunday, my friend,” she said, laying her hand upon his.
“Sunday!” Mr. Quincunx muttered. “Do you call Sunday a day? I regard Sunday as a sort of prison-exercise, when all the convicts go walking up and down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither work nor read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on my best clothes like the rest, and stand at my gate, staring at the weather and wondering what the hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I have on Sunday are when that silly-faced Wone, or one of the Andersens, drifts this way, and we lean over my wall and abuse the gentry.”
“Poor dear!” said the girl pityingly. “I expect the real truth is that you are so tired with your work all the week, that you are glad enough to rest and do nothing.”
Mr. Quincunx’s nostrils dilated, and his drooping moustache quivered. A smile of delicious and sardonic humour wavered over the lower portion of his face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and gleamed with a goblin-like merriment.
“I am getting quite popular at the office,” he said. “I have learnt the secret of it now.”
“And what is the secret?” asked Lacrima, suppressing a queer little gasp in her throat.
“Sucking up,” Mr. Quincunx answered, his face flickering with subterranean amusement, “sucking up to everyone in the place, from the manager to the office boy.”