"What an utter rotter you are!" In spite of himself Mernside laughed, knowing from a long and intimate acquaintance with Wilfred, that the young man's surface nonsense went no deeper than the surface, and that Staynes was in no sense of the word a Lothario. A slight, a very slight, twinge afflicted his own conscience, when he remembered the identity of the girl he had left that afternoon, in the home-like, firelit room, with the girl to whom his cousin had just alluded.
"There is no necessity to tell him that the two girls are one and the same," Rupert argued with himself. "Some day, presumably, he will meet Miss Moore, and he may then recognise her again. But the probability is that by that time, the motor incident will have gone out of his head." Meanwhile, throughout the bantering conversation he carried on with Wilfred, he found himself constantly wondering why the sound of his name, had caused Baba's nurse such surprise and embarrassment. She had seemed so friendly, so natural, so simple, until the moment when his name had been mentioned, and then she had changed into hesitating self-consciousness, her eyes afraid to meet his, her manner uneasy and shy.
The real reason for the change in her never, of course, occurred to him. It was only very occasionally that he even remembered the annoying episode of the matrimonial advertisement, and then merely with a passing feeling of regret, that he had failed to help the girl who had been his fellow-victim in Jack Layton's hoax. The girl's initials had faded from his memory, in the more personal and acute trouble of Margaret Stanforth's continued absence and silence, and he never for a moment connected the writer of the wistful little note signed "C.M.," with Baba's newest and most devoted slave. If his thoughts that evening ran with curious persistency on Christina, her thoughts turned with no less persistency to him and his visit, and above all, to the dismaying discovery that he was the R. Mernside to whom she had audaciously written, who in return had written to her so kindly. After Baba had been safely tucked up in her cot, sleepily asseverating that she meant to go for a ride in Cousin Rupert's car, and that he was "her Christina's prince," Christina herself returned back to the sitting-room, and, seated before the fire, went over in her own mind all the conversation of the afternoon, with its final climax.
"And I don't know whether I ought to tell him who I really am, or not," the girl reflected, looking deep into the heart of the glowing coals. "He was so kind to-day, but I don't believe he would go on feeling kind to a girl who could answer an advertisement like that—even though he would still be kind, because he is a gentleman. I wonder if I ought to tell him? And yet—it would be horrible—horrible to have to say it. I should be so ashamed—-so dreadfully ashamed. Only—I think, perhaps—he would understand how poor I was, how desperate I felt, that day when I wrote to him. He has such an understanding face, and his eyes look as if they had seen so much sorrow, so that he would know what other people's sorrows mean. I wish—I—could be a rest-bringer to him." From that thought, she drifted away to the lonely house in the valley, to the beautiful woman whose troubled face and deep, anguished eyes haunted the girl like an obsession, and to the sick man, whose death, so Dr. Fergusson had said, was only perhaps a matter of a few short weeks. What strange tragedy was hidden by the four walls of that lonely house? What did it all mean—the secrecy, the isolation, and above all the trouble that had been written so plainly on that beautiful woman's face?
"I don't suppose I shall ever see her again," was Christina's final and regretful thought, as she rose to go to bed. "I wish people didn't have to be like 'ships that pass in the night'—only passing—not staying together for a little while."
CHAPTER XIII.
"YOU HAVE BEEN A FRIEND TO ME TO-DAY."
Rupert would have found it difficult to explain why, on the following afternoon, his steps again turned towards Mrs. Nairne's house, and why he assured himself, that it would be kind to Cicely to go to see Baba again, and take the latest tidings of the child back to her mother. He only knew that he had a great desire to sit quietly in that firelit room again, to feel the sense of peace and home-like tranquillity that seemed to hover about it; he only felt that in some inexplicable fashion Baba's new nurse—the girl with the sweet eyes and gentle voice—rested him, that her simplicity, and some child-like quality in her, soothed the pain that tore at his heart. Women had played no part in his life, until one woman had played an overmastering one; and all that his passionate adoration of Margaret Stanforth had cost, and was costing, him, gave an added charm to a nature devoid of all subtlety, simple and serene. Across the stretch of years between them, he regarded Christina as little more than a child, but it is often from a child's hands that the passion-tossed, world-weary soul can find most comfort; and as Mernside for the second time sat in the old-fashioned sitting-room, and had tea with Christina and her small charge, he felt that in some indefinable fashion, the girl's hands were unconsciously smoothing away some of the misery that chafed his soul. She showed no traces of her embarrassment of the previous day. Night had brought its own counsels, and she had determined not to disclose her identity to Mernside.
"After all," she reflected philosophically, "I didn't do anything wrong—only something silly—and it is all over now. Probably he has forgotten all about the stupid girl who wrote him that letter, and anyhow, he doesn't think about me at all, excepting as Baba's nurse, so it would be foolish to make a fuss."