He took up cup and buttered croissant, and for a little while nothing was said, except to Sandy who, upon invitation, repeated his opinion of the Sultan and snapped in the offered emolument with unsatiated satisfaction.
To Rue Carew as well as to Neeland there seemed to be a slight constraint between them—something not entirely new to her since they had met again after two years.
In the two years of her absence she had been very faithful to the memory of his kindness; constant in the friendship which she had given him unasked—given him first, she sometimes thought, when she was a little child in a ragged pink frock, and he was a wonderful young man who had taken the trouble to cross the pasture and warn her out of range of the guns.
He had always held his unique place in her memory and in her innocent affections; she had written to him again and again, in spite of his evident lack of interest in the girl to whom he had been kind. Rare, brief letters from him were read and reread, and laid away with her best-loved treasures. And when the prospect of actually seeing him again presented itself, she had been so frankly excited and happy that the Princess Mistchenka could find in the girl’s unfeigned delight 316 nothing except a young girl’s touching and slightly amusing hero-worship.
But with her first exclamation when she caught sight of him at the terminal, something about her preconceived ideas of him, and her memory of him, was suddenly and subtly altered, even while his name fell from her excited lips.
Because she had suddenly realised that he was even more wonderful than she had expected or remembered, and that she did not know him at all—that she had no knowledge of this tall, handsome, well-built young fellow with his sunburnt features and his air of smiling aloofness and of graceful assurance, almost fascinating and a trifle disturbing.
Which had made the girl rather grave and timid, uncertain of the estimation in which he might hold her; no longer so sure of any encouragement from him in her perfectly obvious attitude of a friend of former days.
And so, shyly admiring, uncertain, inclined to warm response at any advance from this wonderful young man, the girl had been trying to adjust herself to this new incarnation of a certain James Neeland who had won her gratitude and who had awed her, too, from the time when, as a little girl, she had first beheld him.
She lifted her golden-grey eyes to him; a little unexpected sensation not wholly unpleasant checked her speech for a moment.
This was odd, even unaccountable. Such awkwardness, such disquieting and provincial timidity wouldn’t do.