One instinct, to take her in his arms and reassure her by sheer contact, was held in abatement by another, an instinct to stop and reason out the elements that had produced the momentary hiatus. This procrastination on his part had an almost tragic significance for the impulsive girl. She lowered her eyes, pressed her teeth against her lip, straightened her arms, and walked into the house. If he had followed more quickly on her steps she would have succumbed to a passionate desire to be petted. As it was, he reached her side only after she had had time to put on her pride.
There was still a chance, had he been emotionally nimble enough to say something humorous about the visit, something gently satiric about Mrs. Windrom’s exaggerated fear of missing connections with the stage from the Valley to Witney, something natural and relaxed and sympathetic,—if only her old nickname, “Weedgie,”—to reinstate her in the position to which, as his most intimate, she felt entitled.
A great deal, she felt, depended on what his tone would be. She held herself taut, dreading an echo of the hollow courtesies that had filled her rooms for days with such forbidding graciousness.
Keble had a congenital aversion to demonstrations. Tenderness might coax him far, but it would never induce him to “slop over.” As he went to the table for his pipe, his eyes encountered an alien object which he lifted thankfully, for it served as a cue.
“Hello, Mrs. Windrom left her pince-nez behind . . . I’ll have them put into the mail for Sweet to take out this afternoon. Hadn’t you better write a note to go with them, my dear?”
She turned and faced him. In her eyes he saw something smoldering, something whose presence he had on two or three occasions half suspected: a dark, living subtlety that he could attribute only to her Frenchness. Her nostrils were slightly dilated, her lips quietly composed. She walked very close, looked directly into his eyes, and with a little sidelong shrug that brought her shoulder nearly to her chin, whipped out the words, “If I weren’t so damn polite I’d smash them!”
The slam of the door, a few seconds later, drove her exclamation at him with a force that, after the first thrill, left him vexed and bewildered.
CHAPTER II
LOUISE had wondered why Katie Salter had not appeared to do the weekly washing. In the light of a report brought by the mail carrier the reason was now too frightfully clear. Katie’s son, a boy of twelve, had accidentally killed himself while examining an old shot-gun.