Jill set her teeth.
“I told you I knew him as a child. I always called him Wally then.”
“I beg your pardon. I had forgotten.”
“He got me out through the pass-door onto the stage and through the stage-door.”
Derek was feeling cheated. He had the uncomfortable sensation that comes to men who grandly contemplate mountains and … see them dwindle to mole-hills. The apparently outrageous had shown itself in explanation nothing so out-of-the-way after all. He seized upon the single point in Jill’s behavior that still constituted a grievance.
“There was no need for you to go to supper with the man!” Jove-like wrath had ebbed away to something deplorably like a querulous grumble. “You should have gone straight home. You must have known how anxious I would be about you.”
“Well, really, Derek, dear! You didn’t seem so very anxious! You were having supper yourself quite cosily.”
The human mind is curiously constituted. It is worthy of record that, despite his mother’s obvious disapproval of his engagement, despite all the occurrences of this dreadful day, it was not till she made this remark that Derek Underhill first admitted to himself that, intoxicate his senses as she might, there was a possibility that Jill Mariner was not the ideal wife for him. The idea came and went more quickly than breath upon a mirror. It passed, but it had been. There are men who fear repartee in a wife more keenly than a sword. Derek was one of these. Like most men of single outlook, whose dignity is their most precious possession, he winced from an edged tongue.
“My mother was greatly upset,” he replied coldly. “I thought a cup of soup would do her good. And, as for being anxious about you, I telephoned to your home to ask if you had come in.”
“And when,” thought Jill, “they told you I hadn’t, you went off to supper!”