“I felt I must thank you for your little note—and the picture.”
“Well? And are we going to make friends again, Mr. Kent?”
She looked him in the face proudly, yet laughingly, and held out her ungloved hand.
“There!” she added. “I behaved very badly to you this morning, and you must thank Winifred for bringing me to a sense of decency; but really when I saw the dear child's work done to death by my own fault I was not mistress of myself. I suppose it is best when one is in the wrong to own it—to one's friends.”
“It is sensible,” said Kent, “and I am very proud of your reckoning me among your friends.”
She looked at him, a strange little smile playing round the corner of her lips as she put up both hands to withdraw her hat-pin—a graceful attitude, instinct with femininity. The look and the attitude disconcerted Kent for a moment. However, her next words reassured him.
“I judged you by myself, you know. I had found our friendship a pleasant thing, and felt that you did so, too, and I was sorry lest anything should break it; otherwise I should not have taken the trouble to 'climb down,' as they say.”
“Let us say no more about it,” replied Kent magnanimously. “If we pride ourselves on being superior to certain conventionalities of habit, we ought to extend our conventionalities of sentiment. I have been very troubled all day, Miss Davenant, I must confess, and I can't tell you how touched I was by your message. It's not every woman by a long way that would have sent it.”
“And I would not have written it to every man,” returned Clytie; “of that you may be quite certain.”
And so they parted for the night.