"How dared you?" flamed Joan. "How dared you speak to me, touch me like that?"
"Dared?" the man answered; he was watching her with mocking eyes and something evil had come to life on his face. Cold anger that she should have made a fool of him and a baulked passion which could very easily turn to hate. "This outburst is surely a little ridiculous. What did you think I wanted out of the game? Did it really occur to you that I was going to ask you to marry me? My dear girl!" He shrugged his shoulders, conveying by that movement a vast amount of contempt for her dreams. "And as for the rest, I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed, though some of them may pretend they do."
Joan stared at him; he had stooped and was gathering up the roses that lay between them. Rage was creeping away from her and leaving her with a dull sense of undignified defeat. Once again she had pitted the ideal of a dream against a man's harsh reality, and lost. Love! She had dreamed that this man loved her, she had held herself unworthy of the honour he paid her. This was what his honour amounted to—"I have never yet met a woman who objected to being kissed."
She turned away and walked blindly towards the house.
Landon caught her up before she reached the gate of the garden. His arms were full of the roses and apparently he had won back to his usual good nature.
"Having made ourselves thoroughly disagreeable to each other," he said, "let us make it up again for the time being. It is all rather absurd, and you have got to get back to town somehow or other."
He helped her into the car with just his usual solicitude, tucking the rug round her and laying the pile of roses on her lap; but on the way home he was very silent and from the moment they started till the time came for saying good-bye he did not speak a word to her.
As they stood together, while Joan was opening the door with her latch key, he put his hand for a moment over hers.
"Good-bye, Pierrette," he said, "I am sorry you won't have anything to do with me. I should have made you happy and given you a good time. Sometimes it is a pity to aim too high; you are apt to miss things altogether."
Fanny was waiting in Joan's room when she got back, tucked up in her favourite position in the arm-chair. She had been away for the last ten days on one of her periodical trips. "My!" she gasped, disentangling herself to greet the other; "what roses, honey! Straight from the country, aren't they, and a car—I can hear it buzzing outside. Is it your young man?" She paused on the thought tip-toe with excitement, her eyes studying Joan across the flowers she had seized. "And is he straight? the other sort won't do for you; you would hate yourself in a week."