“It's a bit of luck I hadn't expected, Audrey,” he said, at last, unsteadily.
She turned about quite simply, and faced in the direction he was going.
“I shall walk with you,” she said, with a flash of her old impertinence. “You have not asked me to, but I shall, anyhow. Only don't call this luck. It isn't at all. I walk here every Sunday, and every Sunday I say to myself—he will think he needs exercise. Then he will walk, and the likeliest place for him to go is the park. Good reasoning, isn't it?”
She glanced up at him, but his face was set and unsmiling. “Don't pay any attention to me, Clay. I'm a little mad, probably. You see”—she hesitated—“I need my friends just now. And when the very best of them all hides away from me?”
“Don't say that. I stayed away, because—” He hesitated.
“I'm almost through. Don't worry! But I was walking along before I met Clare—I'll tell you about her presently—and I was saying to myself that I thought God owed me something. I didn't know just what. Happiness, maybe. I've been careless and all that, but I've never been wicked. And yet I can look back, and count the really happy days of my life on five fingers.”
She held out one hand.
“Five fingers!” she repeated, “and I am twenty-eight. The percentage is pretty low, you know.”
“Perhaps you and I ask too much?”
He was conscious of her quick, searching glance.