"You have naturally waited for me to speak first," she said with a gracious gesture of her bare hand. "And I was waiting till you should have finished your letters! I, too, have wanted to think."
Her familiar address, perfectly courteous and made in a pleasant voice, with a very slight accent, was a surprise to her companion, who mechanically lifted his hat as he bowed to her across the narrow distance between their seats.
"The guard," she smiled, "came very near putting the placard on the other window! But I think we are now quite sure to be alone!" She pointed to the seat opposite. "Sit there," she more commanded than permitted, "we can talk better and I can watch your kind face, which always looks as if you understood—and I shall be able to please you better—perhaps to make you not unkind to me."
He obeyed, taking the place indicated without hesitation, and as he sat facing her, he saw her to be one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. There was at once something dazzling about her—and at the same time familiar... He had surely met her, and not long ago. Where? And how stupid of him to have forgotten! Or had he only seen her photograph and remarked her as a celebrity whose type of looks had pleased him? But no, she knew him: that was clear. He met her friendly eyes, where liking was evident as well as the suggestion of something akin to an appeal. Bulstrode was greatly intrigued.
"Unkind?" he repeated vaguely. "But why should you think that? Please me?"—and his graciousness did not fall short of her own—"But why should you...?"
"Oh, true," she interrupted him, "quite true. There is no reason why—" and she made a rather petulant gesture—"yet every woman wants to please, and none of us relishes being judged. Never mind, however, don't think of me as a person—just let me talk to you frankly, be myself for once with someone if I can."
Jimmy Bulstrode gathered himself together and sat back in his corner. She was very lovely at it, this being herself. Gallantry would not let him bluntly tell her that she had made a mistake. A second more would clear the matter and would be quite soon enough, for him at least, to find that they were total strangers. Unless, indeed, he had met her and forgotten it. They had possibly held some conversation together in a London drawing-room. But how could he have been such a boor as to forget her? She was neither a crook nor a mad woman—she might be an adventuress; if so, she was an unusual one. He glanced at her luggage as if it might help him—a dark-covered dressing-case, bundle of furs, and rugs—new, everything new. Her left hand was bare of rings, she clasped it with her gloved fellow and said warmly:
"I can't believe it possible that you came, actually came, and that we have so smoothly met! I can't believe nothing has hitched or missed, or that everything is so cleverly planned and arranged for me, and least of all I can believe that it should be you who are so sublimely doing this."
"Ah—" But here Bulstrode tardily started up. He doing it all? At least if he was, then he must, if nothing else—know! He smiled at her with a pleasant sense of being in the secret and with indulgent amusement at her mistake.
"I think—you made a mistake," he began it with commonplaceness, but his gesture softened the words.