“Hullo, Ches,” said Ditmar.
“Now you're the very chap I wanted to see. Where have you been keeping yourself lately? Come out to the farm to-night,—same of the boys'll be there.” Mr. Sprole, like many a self-made man, was proud of his farm, though he did not lead a wholly bucolic existence.
“I can't, Ches,” answered Ditmar. “I've got to go back to Hampton.”
This statement Mr. Sprole unwisely accepted as a fiction. He took hold of Ditmar's arm.
“A lady—eh—what?”
“I've got to go back to Hampton,” repeated Ditmar, with a suggestion of truculence that took his friend aback. Not for worlds would Mr. Sprole have offended the agent of the Chippering Mill.
“I was only joking, Claude,” he hastened to explain. Ditmar, somewhat mollified but still dejected, sought the dining-room when the lawyer had gone.
“All alone to-night, Colonel?” asked the coloured head waiter, obsequiously.
Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.
Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And the knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate him by the mere exercise of that strange feminine force within her was intoxicating and terrifying. She read this in a thousand signs; in his glances; in his movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little things he said, apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a constant recurrence of the apologetic attitude—so alien to the Ditmar formerly conceived—of which he had given evidence that day by the canal: and from this attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current profoundly disturbing. Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a commingled ecstasy and fear that he would seize her in his arms. Yet the tension was not constant, rising and falling with his moods and struggles, all of which she read—unguessed by him—as easily as a printed page by the gift that dispenses with laborious processes of the intellect. On the other hand, a resentment boiled within her his masculine mind failed to fathom. Stevenson said of John Knox that many women had come to learn from him, but he had never condescended to become a learner in return—a remark more or less applicable to Ditmar. She was, perforce, thrilled that he was virile and wanted her, but because he wanted her clandestinely her pride revolted, divining his fear of scandal and hating him for it like a thoroughbred. To do her justice, marriage never occurred to her. She was not so commonplace.