They went through the heavy swing doors, opened for them by a diminutive boy in buttons, into the long, highly decorated, dimly lighted, discreet tea room, which lacked its usual crowd. A few couples, in one case two young men, occupied the cozy corners, to one of the more remote of which Maddison led the way, and settled himself and his companion in the comfortable armchairs. He ordered tea and cakes of the pretty, black-eyed waitress, dainty and demure in the uniform of deep, dull red.
“You sigh as if you were tired, Miss Lewis, and glad to rest?” he said, trying in the dim light to study her expression.
“I am tired and I am glad to rest. It’s very cozy in here. I’ve never been here before.”
She laid her hand upon the arm of the chair next to him and he noticed that she wore a wedding ring.
“I called you Miss Lewis. I see——?”
“Yes—I’m married. I don’t suppose you remember much about Larchstone—I recognized you before you did me; I saw you across the road. But just possibly you do remember our curate, Mr. Squire—you used to laugh at him. I’m Mrs. Squire. He’s still a curate, but not any longer in the country. We live at Kennington; what a world of difference one letter makes! Kennington—Kensington. Have you ever been in Kennington?”
Maddison remembered Edward Squire distinctly: a tall, gaunt enthusiast, clumsy in mind and in body. He leaned back in his chair as a whirl of recollections rushed across his mind: the red-roofed, old-fashioned village of Larchstone; the old-world rector and his daughter, a pretty slip of a country girl, who had grown into—Mrs. Squire. He remembered the summer weeks he had spent there, painting in the famous woodlands, and the half-jesting, half-serious love he had made to the rector’s daughter. Since then until this afternoon he had not met her, though the memory of her face, with the searching eyes, had come to him now and again.
She watched him as he dreamed. He had changed very little; how distinctly she had always remembered him; the swarthy, narrow face framed in heavy black hair, the deep-set black eyes, the thin nose, the trim pointed beard and mustache hiding the sensual mouth, the tall, well-knit figure. Far more vividly than he did she recall those summer months; in her life they had been an outstanding event, an episode merely in his.
“Do you still take three lumps of sugar?” she asked, as she poured out the tea.
“You remember that? Yes, still three, thanks.”