"I have not cut you, Claude. How can you say such a thing?"
"Have you not? Then I know nothing of the cutting process. To be always out when I call—to take infinite trouble to avoid me when we meet in other people's houses! The cut direct was never more stony-hearted and remorseless."
"You must not fancy things," she said lightly.
They were in the Green Park by this time, the quiet Green Park, whence nursemaids and children had vanished, and where even loafers were few at this hour between afternoon and evening.
She spoke lightly, and there was a lightness at her heart that was new. It was sweet to be with him—sweet to be walking at his side on the old familiar terms, friends, companions, comrades, as of old. His careless speech, his supreme ease of manner, seemed to have broken a spell. She looked back and thought of her troubled conscience, and all the scheming and distress of the last two months, and she felt as if she had awakened from a fever dream, from a dreary interval of delirium and hysteria. What danger could there be in such a friendship? What had tragedy to do with Claude Rutherford? This airy trifler, this saunterer through life, was not of the stuff of which lovers are made. He was a man whom all women liked; but he was not the man whom a woman calls her Fate, and who cannot be her friend without being her destroyer. How could she ever have feared him? He was of her own blood. His respect for her race—the race to which he belonged—would hold him in check, even if there were no other restraining influences. The burden of fear was lifted; and her spirits rose to a girlish lightness, as she walked by her cousin's side with swift footsteps, listening to his playful reproaches, his facetious bewailing of his worthlessness. From this time forward she would treat him as a brother. She would never again think it possible that words of love, unholy words, could fall from his lips. No such word had ever been spoken; and was it not shameful in her to have feared him—to imagine him a lover while he had always shown himself her loyal kinsman? In this new and happy hour she forgot that it was her own heart that had sounded the alarm—that it was because she loved him, not because he loved her, that she had resolved upon ruling him out of her life.
Perhaps this evening, after the glamour of Mr. Symeon's assembly, she was "fey." This sudden rush of gladness, this ecstasy of reunion with the friend from whom she had compassed heaven and earth to hold herself aloof, seemed more than the gladness of common day. She trod on air; and when they pulled up suddenly at Hyde Park Comer, it was a surprise to find that they had not been walking towards Portland Place.
"We must make for Stanhope Gate and cross Grosvenor Square and Bond Street," Claude said gaily. "We have come a long way round, but a walk is a walk, and I have no doubt we both wanted one. Perhaps you would prefer a cab."
"No, I like walking, if there is time."
"Plenty of time. You walk like Atalanta, if that young person ever condescended to anything but a run."
"Do you remember our walks in the woods, and the afternoon we lost our way and could not get home for the nursery tea?"