“And off a woman, if she wore neither belt, gloves, nor neck arrangement!”
“Exactly. It would be actually making us a present for life of nearly an hour a day. That would be seven hours a week, or nearly a fortnight a year,” I said. “It’s worth consideration.”
“Do you remember the derision heaped upon that time-saving arrangement of our ancestors, the elastic-side boot?” she observed, with a merry smile. “But just fancy the trouble they must have saved in lacing and buttoning! Sewing on shoe-buttons ought always to be done by criminals condemned to hard labour. Button-sewing tries the conscientiousness and thoroughness of the work more than anything else, and I’m certain oakum-picking can’t be worse. It also tries the quality of the thread more than anything else; and as to cottons, well, it treats them as Samson did the withs.”
The carriage met her outside the Stores in the Haymarket at five o’clock, and before she took leave of me she mischievously asked—
“Well, and how do you find me when I wear my mask?”
“Charming,” I responded with enthusiasm. “Mask or no mask, you are always the same to me, the most charming friend I have ever had.”
“No, no,” she laughed. “It isn’t good form to flatter. Good-bye.”
And she stretched forth her small hand, which I pressed warmly, with deep regret at parting. A moment later the footman in his brown livery assisted her into the carriage. Then she smiled merrily, and bowed as I raised my hat, and she was borne away westward in the stream of fine equipages, hers the smartest of them all.
A week later, having seen nothing further of her, I wrote and received a prompt response. Then in the happy autumn days that followed we contrived to meet often, and on each occasion I grew deeper and deeper in love with her. Since that evening when we had stood together beneath the street lamp in Kensington, she had made no mention of the pencil-case or of its owner. Indeed, it seemed that her sudden identification of it had betrayed her into acknowledging that its owner had been her lover, and that now she was trying to do all she could to remove any suspicion from my mind.
Nevertheless, the remembrance of that crime and of all the events of that midnight adventure was ever within my mind, and I had long ago determined to make its elucidation the chief object of my life. I had placed myself beneath the thrall of some person unknown, and meant to extricate myself and become again a free agent at all costs.