‘What a loss to society!’ sneered Edward Clare. ‘I think you are the most ridiculous girl in the world, Celia, to interest yourself in people who are as far off your groove as if they were the inhabitants of the moon.’
‘Homo sum,’ said Celia, proud of a smattering of Latin, the crumbs that had fallen from her brother’s table, ‘and all the varieties of mankind are interesting to me. I should like to have been a dancer myself, if I had not been a clergyman’s daughter. It must be an awfully jolly life.’
‘Delightful,’ exclaimed Edward, ‘especially when it ends abruptly through the carelessness of a drunken scene-shifter.’
‘I must say good-night and good-bye,’ said John Treverton to Laura. ‘I have my portmanteau to pack ready for an early start to-morrow morning. Indeed, I am inclined to go by the mail to-night. It would save me half-a-day.’
‘The mail leaves at a quarter past ten. You’ll have to look sharp if you travel by that,’ said Edward.
‘I’ll try it, at any rate.’
‘Good-night, Mr. Treverton,’ said Laura, giving him her hand.
The lively Celia was not going to let him depart with so cold a farewell. He was a man, and, as such, eminently interesting to her.
‘We’ll all walk to the gate with you,’ she said; ‘it will be better for us than sitting yawning here, watching the bats skimming across the flower-beds.’
They all went, and it happened somehow, to John Treverton’s tremulous delight, that Laura and he were side by side, a little behind the other two.