But it was in the night watches that the worst truth struck him. He had been furious with Miss Waring for not spending more upon her lunch, he had upbraided her for it, and she had never turned round and said, "Look what I earn!" The opportunity was made to her hand. "How can women secretaries earning a hundred a year eat three-and-sixpenny lunches?" That ought to have been her answer. Why wasn't it? She hadn't been too stupid to see it. She had seen it, and she had instantly, before he had had time to see it himself, covered it up and hidden it under that uncalled-for eulogy on port. It was not fear. She hadn't been afraid to stand up to him (uncalled-for eulogies were standing up to him); besides she had previously called him unfair to his face. It was just something that Miss Waring was—something that made the color spring into Mr. Traver's face in the dark till his cheeks burned; something that had made Mr. Belk dare his chief's displeasure to get her lunch; something that wasn't business.
"She wouldn't take an advantage, because I'd given it to her," he said to himself. "I thought everybody took an advantage when they had the sense to see it; but she doesn't, though she has plenty of sense. But the world couldn't go on like that."
This brilliant idea reassured Mr. Travers; he stopped blushing. He was relieved to think that the world couldn't go on like Stella; but there was something in him, a faint contradictory something, that made him glad that Stella didn't go on like the world.
He went to sleep with these two points unreconciled.
CHAPTER XII
Stella had always known that it would come; she had spent two months far-seeing it. It had usually taken the form of a telegram falling out of Mrs. Waring's wool, or Eurydice standing upon the steps, Cassandra-like, to greet her with a message from Marian. Marian would come to give her the message, but she wouldn't wait; she would drive swiftly away in a motor, and leave the broken universe behind her. But disasters do not come as we have planned their coming.
It was a dull November day, the streets were full of dying leaves, and at the end of all the cross-roads surrounding the town hall a blue mist hung like a curtain. Marian, in black velvet and furs, with old Spanish ear-rings gleaming from her shell-like ears, stood in disgust upon the steps of the town hall. Her small face was frozen with unexpected pain, but she could still feel annoyed with the porter. She stood in the thronged corridor and asked decisively for Miss Waring.
The porter told her that Miss Waring worked in No. 7, or, at any rate, No. 7 would know where she was working.
Marian stared slightly over the porter's head.