She said good-bye, therefore, without attempting to press the matter; and a moment later the car glided away, its lamps gleaming in the rural blackness of the village street.
As he rode home, his tyres splashing through puddles, and spattering him with mud, Herrick's face was very tired and worn, but in his eyes there lurked a little faint light of happiness that he had helped another weary soul a few steps forward on its pilgrimage over a thorny road.
"Poor little soul!" He smiled as he recognized the form his sympathy took. "After all she's right—she has a soul—and even though it brings her suffering and tears, it's worth the price. And yet—I wonder if it would have been kinder to leave her alone—not to encourage that hope of hers to make herself more intellectually worthy of her husband? I didn't make much success of waking my Undine's soul to life! All I got was her hatred—and from the beginning she lied to me!"
Luckily at that moment his lamp blew out, viciously; and with a muttered execration of the creatures he called Boo-Boos, he dismounted and relighted the flame, whose vagaries throughout the rest of the long ride kept him so fully occupied that he had neither time nor inclination to meditate on such abstractions as souls.
CHAPTER XVIII
By the end of September, Owen's book was finished; and on a beautiful autumn morning he and Toni set off in the car on a journey to town, where a publisher, who was also a personal friend, was waiting to receive the manuscript.
Mr. Anson was a kindly, energetic man of middle age; and he had secretly long expected Owen to turn novelist; so that he accepted the bulky manuscript with a real curiosity as to its value.
He promised to let the author know his decision at an early date; and then invited Owen and his wife to lunch with him at the Carlton, an invitation which Owen accepted at once, rather to Toni's dismay.
They were his sole guests; and beneath his kind and courteous manner, Toni lost her shyness and charmed her host by her girlish simplicity and directness.