Part 27 (2/2)

”I hope you have made it as beautiful as Elfrida is,”

she cried, with sharp self-reproof. ”It must have been difficult to do that.”

”I have made it--what she is, I think,” he answered, again with that sudden gravity. ”It is so like my conception of her which I have never felt permitted to explain to you, that I feel as if I had stolen a march upon her.

You must see it. When will you come? It goes in the day after to-morrow, but I can't wait for your opinion till it's hung.”

”I like your calm reliance upon the Committee,” Janet laughed. ”Suppose--”

”I won't. It will go on the line,” Kendal returned confidently. ”I did nothing last year that I will permit to be compared with it. Will you come to-morrow?”

”Impossible; I haven't two consecutive minutes to-morrow.

We sail, you know, on Thursday.”

Kendal looked at her blankly. ”You _sail?_ On Thursday?”

”I am going to America, Lady Halifax and I. And Elizabeth, of course. We are to be away a year. Lady Halifax is buying tickets, I am collecting light literature, and Elizabeth is in pursuit of facts. Oh, we are deep in preparation. I thought you knew.”

”How could I possibly know?”

”Elfrida didn't tell you, then?”

”Did she know?”

”Oh yes, ten days ago.”

”Odd that she didn't mention it.”

Janet told herself that it was odd, but found with some surprise that it was not more than odd. There had been a time when the discovery that she and her affairs were of so little consequence to her friend would have given her a wondering pang; but that time seemed to have pa.s.sed.

She talked lightly on about her journey; her voice and her thoughts, had suddenly been freed. She dilated upon the pleasures she antic.i.p.ated as if they had been real, skimming over the long s.p.a.ces of his silence, and gathering gaiety as he grew more and more sombre. When he rose to go their moods had changed: the brightness and the flush were hers, and, his face spoke only of a puzzled dejection, an anxious uncertainty.

”So it is good-by,” he said, as she gave him her hand, ”for a year!”

Something in his voice made her look up suddenly, with such an unconscious tenderness in her eyes as he had never seen in any other woman's. She dropped them before he could be quite certain he recognized it, though his heart was beating in a way which told him there had been no mistake.

”Lady Halifax means it to be a year,” she answered--and surely, since it was to be a year, he might keep her hand an instant longer.

The full knowledge of what this woman was to him seemed to descend upon John Kendal then, and he stood silent under it, pale and grave-eyed, baring his heart to the rush of the first serious emotion life had brought him, filled with a single conscious desire--that she should show him that sweetness in her eyes again. But she looked wilfully down, and he could only come closer to her, with a sudden muteness upon his ready lips, and a strange new-born fear wrestling for possession of him. For in that moment Janet, hitherto so simple, so approachable, as it were so available, had become remote, difficult, incomprehensible. Kendal invested her with the change in himself, and quivered in uncertainty as to what it might do with her. He seemed to have nothing to trust to but that one glance for knowledge of the girl his love had newly exalted; and still she stood before him looking down. He took two or three vague steps into the middle of the room, drawing her with him. In their nearness to each other the silence between them held them intoxicatingly, and he had her in his arms before he found occasion to say, between his lingering kisses upon her hair, ”You can't go, Janet. You must stay--and marry me.”

”I don't know,” wrote Lawrence Cardiff in a postscript to a note to Miss Bell that evening, ”that Janet will thank me for forestalling her with such all-important news, but I can't resist the pleasure of telling you that she and Kendal got themselves engaged, without so much as a 'by your leave' to me, this afternoon. The young man shamelessly stayed to dinner, and I am informed that they mean to be married in June. Kendal is full of your portrait; we are to see it to-morrow. I hope he has arranged that we shall have the advantage of comparing it with the original.”

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

”Miss Cardiff's in the lib'ry, sir,” said the housemaid, opening, the door for Kendal next morning with a smile which he did not find too broadly sympathetic. He went up the stairs two steps at a time, whistling like a schoolboy.

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