"Yes," said Miss Grey, and no more.
"I have been at your house, Miss Grey, and saw your people; and I heard that possibly you were in the park. I thought perhaps you would have been at home. When I saw you last night you seemed to believe that you would be at home all the day." This was said in a gentle tone of implied reproach.
"You spoke then of walking in the park, Mr. Sheppard."
"And I have kept my word, you see," Mr. Sheppard said, not observing the implied reason for her change of purpose.
"Yes, I see it now," she answered, as one who should say, "I did not count upon it then."
Of all men else, Minola Grey would have avoided him. She knew only too well what he had come for. She would perhaps have disliked him for that in any case, but she certainly disliked him on his own account. His formal and heavy manners impressed her disagreeably, and she liked to say things that puzzled and startled him. It was a pleasure to her to throw some paradox or odd saying at him, and watch his awkward attempts to catch it, and then while he was just on the point of getting at some idea of it to bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognized as part of the business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of place when adopted by a layman and a man of the world, who was still young.
"I am glad to have found you at last," Mr. Sheppard said, with a grave smile.
"You might have found me at first," Minola said, quoting from Artemus Ward, "if you had come a little sooner, Mr. Sheppard. I have only lately escaped here."
"I wish I had known, and I would have come a great deal sooner. May I take the liberty of sitting beside you?"
"I am going to stand, Mr. Sheppard. But that need not prevent you from sitting."