"I should so much have liked to tell you," murmured Paul, thinking he might even have sat out another dance if it were not for his foolish exclamation.
"Oh, but you're going to call, Mr. Middleton."
"I shall be very happy," said Paul, repressing a start.
She wrote her address for him on the back of his programme, adding, "I shall be in on Wednesday afternoon."
He thanked her and took her down to the dancing-room where she was pounced upon immediately, and he then discovered, to his surprise, that he and Miss Brooke had sat out two dances! Moreover, the frown which Celia gave him over her partner's shoulder as she waltzed by made him refer to his programme, when he found he had overlooked the little tick at the side of dance number fourteen.
CHAPTER II.
"A day and a half to wait before seeing Miss Brooke again," was Paul's first reflection the next morning. "All I should have laughed at as absurd a month ago, proves to be true. I am fast in the toils." And all through the day Miss Brooke filled his thoughts. He was, somehow, a different person from before, as if he had awakened from some sluggish torpor.
All his life Paul had suffered from an excess of parental love, which had considerably curtailed his freedom; and even when the death of his father a year before had left him his own master, he had no thought of living away from his mother, much to her secret gratification. Her fondness for him had been such that she had had him educated at home for several years, and was only persuaded to let him go to school under great pressure from her husband. She had established her influence over her boy from the beginning, and his pliable and obedient disposition had enabled her to maintain it now that he was grown up. His father, who had divided his time between collecting beautiful beetles, representing a rural constituency, enacting the good Samaritan, and, as Paul had told Miss Brooke, thundering and writing letters to the press against foreign missions, had cherished an ambitious career for his son. He himself, he felt, was a mere pawn on the parliamentary chessboard, and he dreamt of a really great political future for Paul, who, moreover, he hoped, would leave his mark on the social life of the generation by promoting the increase of public fine-art collections. Beautiful centres of art—beautiful buildings with beautiful contents—could be established, he argued, if the money subscribed for foreign missions could be used for the purpose; and he had the necessary statistics ready to hurl at the head of the sceptic.