It was a delicious situation. Judge Barton rubbed his hands in enjoyment of it, and you must admit that he had some justification in the lady’s persistent refusal to make the best of his somewhat generous efforts to establish friendly relations. Oh, yes, it was a delicious situation; and the only one element in it which the Judge never suspected was that secret response to the young man’s tenderness which the lover himself had divined, which whetted him in spite of studied rebuffs, and which, his alleged democracy notwithstanding, all Judge Barton’s class instincts would have unhesitatingly pronounced unseemly—as, indeed, the young woman herself regarded it.
Chapter II
Charlotte Ponsonby continued to lean against the window in an abstraction which registered impressions very much as a flagellant’s ecstasy may note the pathway of his torment. The consciousness of her own perturbation made it exceedingly difficult to turn around. She was so unhappy that it seemed the fact must be evident to even a casual observer. She was afraid of a kindly word, or of a mere friendly glance, lest it should break through the self control she had been exerting.
When at length the National Anthem had been played, and lucent amber was fading into early dusk, the nurse had no further excuse for turning her back on the two patients in her ward. She did not glance at them as she moved away, but her quick return with a glass of milk showed that one of them, at least, was in her thoughts. She offered the refreshment to Collingwood with an explanation, in a dry, professional tone, for its being three minutes late.
He sipped it, looking over the rim with his steadfast brown eyes.
“I’m tired,” he said fretfully.
“I suppose you must be. I will move you when you have finished that.”
“I wonder,” Judge Barton mused, “if nurses do not sometimes feel like saying ‘So am I’ when we fellows complain of being tired, or nervous, or out of patience.”
Miss Ponsonby threw him a smile of recognition for the courtesy of the thought. “Very often they do,” she replied, “but that thought would not come in the case of Mr. Collingwood, because he is tired, and we know that he suffers. Nurses seldom think of themselves so long as they can reasonably think of their patients.” Her outstretched hand conveyed an intimation to the patient under discussion that he was taking an unusual time to consume a glass of milk.