But Marcus despised her. He knew she had done it to impress Diana, and didn’t mean it.
“I wouldn’t ask you to come back to London at this time of year,” he said gently.
“You are both darlings,” said Diana, and she went and left them.
And Elsie talked calmly of the joys of the country—mentioning incidentally the heat of London pavements, and Marcus said nothing, but he thought the more. Elsie now looked quite cool: her complexion was fair, and that, in conjunction with her grey eyes, made her look younger than she ought to have looked, or than he had expected her to look.
He spun out his visit till tea-time, and after tea Elsie volunteered to walk to the station with him. “We may meet Shan’t,” she said.
They walked and they met Shan’t. She was being escorted home by a family of boys and girls, and was among those who filled a pony-cart to overflowing. She was rioting; no other word described the joy that possessed her. She was playing mad bulls with a boy a little smaller than herself. Elsie called her to stop: besought her to speak to her Uncle Marcus—but she couldn’t listen—she was laughing—how she laughed! Marcus had a train to catch—and the pony-cart passed on, Shan’t still fighting the small boy—and laughing—so happy and Uncle Marcus was so neglected.
“She didn’t realize it was you,” said Aunt Elsie. “Children so soon forget.”
She might have spared him that thrust which he had not the strength to parry. She might have known that no child who is playing mad bulls with a little boy, sufficiently mad, will stop to look at an elderly uncle—or to listen to an—elderly aunt.
In the train Marcus comforted himself by picturing a scene in which he and Shan’t made it up. He said, “Why didn’t you stop and speak to your Uncle Marcus?”
And Shan’t said, “Well, you see, darlin’,”—her fingers popped in and out of the button-holes of his coat,—“I was so busy—I really didn’t—quite properly see it was you.”