There was a pause, and then the woman to whom the question had been put did in answer a very extraordinary thing. After having looked round, and with furtive, deliberate scrutiny noted that the platform was now practically deserted save for one man standing some way off, facing the bookstall and with his back to the express—she moved for a moment up on to the step of the railway carriage and turned her face, the lovely face now flushed with something like tenderness and pity, up to the young man.
"Of course I'm sorry you're going——"
Her clear, delicately modulated tones floated across the short space to where Mrs. Kaye was sitting.
"Kiss me," breathed the beautiful lips; and then with a touch of impatience, "You can kiss me good-bye. Don't you understand?"
His sudden response, the way his arm shot out and crushed her face, her slender shoulders, was far more than she had bargained for. She stepped back and shook herself like a bird whose plumage has been ruffled.
And then the train began to move.
Young Kaye leant out, dangerously far, but, in answer to a slight movement of Mrs. Maule's hand, he sank back quite out of his mother's sight. She heard his last hoarse cry of "good-bye," and for the moment it had a strange effect on her heart. It seemed to set a seal on her deep pain and wrath, to bring a certain fierce comfort in the knowledge that her boy was gone, that he had left the shameful joy of the last year, the tragic pain of the last few weeks, behind him. She even told herself that, in the years that must elapse before he came home again, he would have time to forget—as men do forget—the woman who had made such a fool and worse, such a traitor, of him.
Mrs. Maule stood for a while looking after the train. Things had not fallen out quite as she had expected them to do. She sometimes—not often—acted on sheer impulse, but she seldom did so without very soon repenting of it. She had been suddenly moved to do a daring thing,—one of those things which give a sharp edge to a blurred emotion. But she had not known how to allow, so she told herself, frowning, for the existence in the subject of her experiment of an unreasonably primitive violence of feeling.
She moved back and looked about her with an uncomfortable, rather fearful, look in her eyes. As she did so, the man standing by the bookstall also moved, and she became aware, with the quick instinct she had for such things, that he had a striking, in fact, a very peculiar face. She hoped he had seen nothing of that foolish little scene with Bayworth Kaye.