"Half Leicestershire is in Bond Street in a frost," he said. "I knew I'd run across somebody. I've been up myself since Friday. But what is Barnaby doing in town? What do the doctors say?"
What a fool she had been not to have dreaded this. Half Leicestershire in Bond Street! And she had fled to London, the great, engulfing city—! She could have laughed wildly at herself, at her childish want of precaution, her romantic imprudence in haunting places where she had been with him, where it was so likely that she would meet his acquaintances. But what would he think of her when he heard that she had been seen....?
Mechanically she walked on a few paces. Rackham was still at her right hand; he would not be shaken off. And Kilgour was talking in his loud, kind, friendly voice; taking it for granted that Barnaby and she were in town together. He did not guess that she was a runaway.
"It came to me in a vision on the top of Burrough Hill," he said. "Rain and mist and the setting sun.... A kind of greyish-black gauziness with a stripe of crimson. There! What do you think of that?"
With a grandiloquent gesture he pointed out a diminutive grey and black turban throned in solitary majesty in the middle of a shop-window. His shop; his personal achievement. A quaint pride sat on his good red face, roughened by wind and weather. It was somewhat akin to the pride great men feel in doing little things. The big successes in life are too overweighting; they oppress a man with the memory of his struggle, the long strain, the effort,—the troubling secret of how he has fallen short. Kilgour might have swelled with pride over greater matters, but when he thought of them he was humble.... He wagged a delighted forefinger at his creation, boasting.
"There isn't much of it," said Rackham.
Susan was between the two men; she felt like a caught bird that dared not flutter, and she had still a frantic desire to laugh.
"That's it," said Kilgour. "No feminine exaggeration. It's all idea and no trimming, instead of all trimmings and no idea. And as light as a feather. I tried it on myself."
She was laughing; not at the absurd image his speech called up, not at the picture of this bluff sportsman gravely regarding himself in a mirror, balancing his insecure idea on his close-cropped head;—but at the tragic absurdity of her own position. How little they knew, these men!
"Good-bye," she said. "I—I am in a hurry."