Jack and his party did not at once come across him. They found enough to amuse them at the lower end of the room—the more as to the barrister the great and little with whom he rubbed shoulders were all one. Strange to say, he did not discern any great difference even in their dress! With Daintry hanging on his arm and Kate at his side he was content, until, turning suddenly in the thick of the crowd to speak to the elder girl, he saw her face turn crimson. At the same moment she bowed slightly to some one behind him. He looked round quickly, with a sharp jealous pang at his heart, to see who had called forth this show of emotion, and found himself face to face with the rector.
Lindo had looked forward to this meeting; he had prepared himself for it; and yet, occurring in this way, it shook him out of his self-possession. He colored almost as deeply as the girl had, and, though he held out his hand with scarcely a perceptible pause, the action was nervous and jerky. “By Jove! is it you, Jack?” he exclaimed, his tone a mixture of old cordiality and new antagonism. “How do you do, Miss Bonamy?” and he held out his hand to the girl also, who just touched it with her fingers and drew back. “It is pleasant to see your cousin’s face again,” he went on more glibly, yet clearly not at his ease even now. “I was sorry that I was not in last night when he called.”
“Yes, I was sorry to miss you,” Jack answered slowly, his eyes on his friend’s face. He could not quite understand matters. The girl’s embarrassment had been almost a revelation to him, and yet it flashed across his mind now that the cause of it might have been only the quarrel between her father and the rector. The same thing might account for Lindo’s shy, ungenial manner. And yet—and yet he could not quite understand it, and, whether he would or no, his face grew hard. “You heard I had looked in?” he added.
“Yes; Mrs. Baker told me,” Lindo answered, moving to let some one pass him, and glancing aside to smile a recognition.
“She looks the better for the change, I think.”
“Yes; she gets more fresh air now.”
“It does not seem to have done you much good.”
“No?”
Certainly there was something amiss. These were old, tried college friends, or had been so a few weeks back, and they had nothing more to say to one another than this! The rector’s self-consciousness began to infect the other, sowing in his mind he knew not what suspicions. So that, if ever words of Daintry’s were welcome, they were welcome now. “Jack is going to stay a week,” she said inconsequently, standing on one leg the while with her arm through Jack’s and her big eyes on the rector’s face.
“I am very glad to hear it,” Lindo rejoined. “He will find me at home more than once in the week, I hope.”