Apparently her glance at his face had satisfied her. She answered him this time without hesitation.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Her voice was very musical and refined. It harmonised better with her face than with her worn, work-girl’s dress, and the dignified deference of her manner.
“Then you must let me see you safely part of the way, at any rate,” said Julian impulsively.
She hesitated, and looked at him again, and this time the large eyes grew moist with tears.
“It’s very silly of me,” she said tremulously. “I—I think it was his touching me that upset me so.”
She had been rubbing one hand, all this time, mechanically and involuntarily, as it seemed, over the hand on which that drunken touch had fallen.
“I did try to get a ’bus, but they were all full. I couldn’t let you take such trouble.”
It needed only the unconscious gratitude of those words to convince Julian that it would be no trouble whatever. And he asserted the same with an assumption of authority and masterfulness quite new to him.
It was an hour and a half later when his mother, sitting up, wakeful, in her own room, caught the slight sound made by his latch-key in the door, and noticed a moment’s pause before the door was opened. In that pause there had come to Julian one of those sudden flashes of light which sometimes illuminate a vainly-pondered question.