‘A mouse-trap. There are lots of mice in this kitchen—sooty mice, not clean like ours—and I thought I’d try to catch them. That was what I went so far to buy, as there were no shops open just about here. I’ll set it now.’
She proceeded at once to do so, and Pierston remained in his seat regarding the operation, which seemed entirely to engross her. It was extraordinary, indeed, to observe how she wilfully limited her interests; with what content she received the ordinary things that life offered, and persistently refused to behold what an infinitely extended life lay open to her through him. If she had only said the word he would have got a licence and married her the next morning. Was it possible that she did not perceive this tendency in him? She could hardly be a woman if she did not; and in her airy, elusive, offhand demeanour she was very much of a woman indeed.
‘It only holds one mouse,’ he said absently.
‘But I shall hear it throw in the night, and set it again.’
He sighed and left her to her own resources and retired to rest, though he felt no tendency to sleep. At some small hour of the darkness, owing, possibly, to some intervening door being left open, he heard the mouse-trap click. Another light sleeper must have heard it too, for almost immediately after the pit-pat of naked feet, accompanied by the brushing of drapery, was audible along the passage towards the kitchen. After her absence in that apartment long enough to reset the trap, he was startled by a scream from the same quarter. Pierston sprang out of bed, jumped into his dressing-gown, and hastened in the direction of the cry.
Avice, barefooted and wrapped in a shawl, was standing in a chair; the mouse-trap lay on the floor, the mouse running round and round in its neighbourhood.
‘I was trying to take en out,’ said she excitedly, ‘and he got away from me!’
Pierston secured the mouse while she remained standing on the chair. Then, having set the trap anew, his feeling burst out petulantly—
‘A girl like you to throw yourself away upon such a commonplace fellow as that quarryman! Why do you do it!’
Her mind was so intently fixed upon the matter in hand that it was some moments before she caught his irrelevant subject. ‘Because I am a foolish girl,’ she said quietly.