"Oh, we'll telephone and put him off. He'd much sooner be told that I'd gone out. But he can give me some more of that medicine; it makes me sleep. And I'm quite hungry."
She hurried through breakfast and ran into her bathroom, eager to be by herself, where she could piece together her dream before it faded from her memory. The voice of the child-lover was the voice that she had heard in the train. If he ever kissed her again, she would know him, though she seemed never to have seen his face. Perhaps she would never see him, perhaps Destiny had contrived that they should always be lovers and should never meet, perhaps this was why she had felt frightened on waking. It was absurd, but delightful. She wanted to meet her playmate.... And it was a long time to wait until she could go to bed and dream of him again.
She ran into the Park, because she had been running in the dream; it was more natural; she was a child again, in a mood of unclouded happiness. The passers-by paused to stare and smile, but she smiled back at them and waved her hand. A young officer shot by in a car, turned round and stopped to ask if he could give her a lift, as she seemed to be in a hurry. "It's only lightness of heart," she explained with dancing eyes. The officer looked wonderingly at her and drove to his club, where he described the encounter and opined that Lady Barbara Neave ("It couldn't have been any one else") had apparently gone suddenly mad.
In the Park she found O'Rane basking on a chair in the sunshine and crumpling the silky ears of his Saint Bernard. She sat down beside him, panting for breath and challenging him to guess who she was.
"I knew before you spoke," he answered. "No one else in London wears quite so many carnations to the square inch. I smelt them the moment you came within range."
"I have them sent up three times a week from the Abbey. I'm going to put one in your button-hole as a prize for being so clever."
"Oh, I can be much cleverer than that, when I try," he laughed. "Lady Barbara, either the sunshine's gone to your head—it always does with me; so much of my misspent life has been in the sun, I feel starved in England—; either that, or something very remarkable has happened to you. You've got a different voice, you're a different person. The last time——"
"Ah, don't talk about it," she interrupted. "I'm happy to-day."
"I know you are! If I painted you to-day, there'd be a riot of blue——"