What Timmy Did

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

She told herself that in a sense it had been her fault. They were sitting on a fallen tree trunk, in a lonely little wood, Jack, as he seldom was, tongue-tied and dull. Piqued, she had twitted him on his silence. And then, all at once, he had turned and, seizing her roughly, had kissed her with the pent-up passion of a man in love who till now has never kissed a woman.

Pacing slowly in her dark garden, Enid Crofton's pulse quickened at the recollection of those maladroit, hungry kisses. Something—a mere glancing streak of the great shaft of ecstasy which enveloped Jack Tosswill's whole being had touched her senses into what had seemed to him marvellous response.

When at last he had released her, and in words of at once triumphant and humble adoration, had made her an offer of marriage, she had felt it an absurd anti-climax to a very delicious and, even in her well-stored memory, a unique experience.

And now she remembered the last time a man had kissed her. It was quite a little while ago, on the day she had taken possession of The Trellis House. Of course Captain Tremaine had tipped the guard so that they should have a carriage to themselves. But she had been uncomfortably aware that he was half-ashamed of himself—that he remembered, all the time, that she was a newly-made widow.

Somehow Jack Tosswill hadn't remembered that. Jack hadn't thought of it. But oh! how absurd he had been when his first rapture was over. Without even waiting for an answer to his proposal, he had coolly suggested they should wait till he had made a start at the Bar! At last she had managed to make him listen to her plea that, till a year had elapsed, she could not think of re-marriage. And he had believed her!

All at once she told herself, a little ruefully, that she had perhaps been foolish; that this affair, slight and altogether unimportant as it was, might become a tiresome complication. Of course she could keep him in order, but she was well aware that when a man had kissed her once, he generally wanted to kiss her again, and very soon.

In principle, she had no objection to Jack Tosswill's kisses. There was something fresh, alluring, wholly delightful, even to so hardened a flirt as was Enid Crofton, in being the object of a youth's first love. But she told herself, almost fiercely, that she must make him understand very, very clearly that, though they might sometimes kiss, they must never be caught. Fortunately Jack was curiously cautious for so young a man. That had been one of the reasons why she had been tempted to—well—to make him lose his head.

And then another figure, one of far greater importance and moment to herself than poor Jack Tosswill, came and challenged Enid Crofton to anxious attention. How did she stand with regard to Godfrey Radmore?

She stopped in her pacing, and stared straight before her. For the first time in her life she was quite at a loss as to what a man, of whom she was seeing a great deal, really felt about her.

Rosamund Tosswill was very young, and Enid secretly thought her very stupid, but there could be no doubt as to her essential truthfulness. Now, a day or two ago, Rosamund had said: "Isn't it funny of Godfrey? He told Janet when he first came here that he had made up his mind to remain a bachelor!"