Part 5 (1/2)

”We're both the same in reality, Miss Kitty. Only, you are focussing it from one end, and I from another. I mean, you are too abominably young and I am too abominably old, for conversation. We shall have to keep to the favourite poets, after all.”

Katharine had come round to the side of the bed, and was regarding him critically, with a very serious look on her face.

”What is the matter?” she asked abruptly. ”I hate people to say they are old--when they are nice people. It makes me feel horrid; I don't like it. I never let daddy talk about growing old; it gives me a sort of cold feel, don't you know? I wish you wouldn't. Besides, I am not young, either; I am nearly nineteen. I know I look much younger, because I won't put my hair up; but my skirts are nearly to the ground. What makes you say I am too young to be talked to?”

”I said you were too young for conversation. It is not quite the same thing, is it?”

”Isn't it?” said Katharine, and she looked away out of the window for a full minute. What she saw there she could not have told, but it was something that had never been there before. When she brought her eyes round again to his face, the serious look had gone out of them, and they were twinkling with fun. ”I know!” she laughed. ”Let's talk without any conversation.”

”She's the same woman, after all,” was Paul's reflection.

They did not mention the favourite poets again; but they had no difficulty for the rest of the afternoon in finding something to talk about. It was getting late when the garden gate gave its usual warning, and Katharine got up with a sigh.

”When shall I see you again?” he asked. They had not gone through the formality of shaking hands, this time.

”When Aunt Esther has _not_ gone to see a poor woman who has lost her baby,” said Katharine, laughing.

”Nonsense! we will keep the letters and the newspaper for that kind of visit. Won't some one else die, don't you think, so that we can have another talk?”

”I'll see,” said Katharine, which could not strictly be called an answer to his question. But it fully satisfied Paul.

CHAPTER IV

The weeks crept on; and Paul Wilton, from being merely an object of interest and pity, gradually became the greatest mystery in the neighbourhood. Such a reputation was entirely unsought on his part, although, had he been aware of it, the probability is that it would not have been wholly unpleasing to him. For it had been his pose through life to mystify people,--not by deliberately a.s.suming to be what he was not, but by strenuously avoiding any appearance of what he was; and his indifference, which was what people first noticed in him, was entirely feigned for the purpose of concealing that his real att.i.tude towards life was a critical one. It was not unreasonable that a man of this calibre, suddenly placed in a quiet country parish, should end in making some sort of a sensation there. Miss Esther from the beginning had suffered much, and silently; but a man who had a father in Crockford and a mother in Debrett, was to be forgiven a good deal, and she felt compelled to overlook even the ash of his cigarettes, and his French novels, when she found them both on the chaste counterpane of the best spare-room bed. But there were others in Ivingdon who, not having much of a pedigree themselves, were inclined to undervalue the importance of one; and some of these, the doctor, for instance, and Peter Bunce the churchwarden, came to the Rector for enlightenment.

”Eh, but he doan't give hisself away much, do he, now?” said the churchwarden, jerking his thumb in the direction of the lame man, who had just swung himself past the window on his crutches. ”He be proper close, I reckon, eh?”

”He is a very intelligent young man,” said the Rector vaguely. ”He has quite an appreciation of Oriental china.”

It was Sunday afternoon, and the Rector was dispensing whiskey and cigars to his guests, with a prodigality that might have been attributed to Miss Esther's absence at the Sunday school. There was an ease, too, about their manners and their conversation, which was to be traced to the same cause.

”I suppose he's beastly clever, and all that, isn't he?” asked Ted morosely. He was sitting on the window ledge, a convenient position which allowed him to shout occasional answers to the questions that came from Katharine on the other side of the lawn. Just then, however, she was joined by Paul; and Ted knew instinctively that he would have no more questions to answer after that.

”It is difficult to say what he is,” observed the doctor. ”You can't get him to talk; at least, not much. Generally, when I've done all the professional business, he relapses into total silence, and I just have to go; but sometimes he is inclined to be chatty, and then he makes a delightful companion. But the odd thing is, that I know no more about the man himself at the end of a conversation than I did at the beginning. A barrister, did you say he was? That accounts for the judicial manner, then; but the question is, what is there behind it all?”

No one seemed to have an answer ready to the doctor's question; but Peter Bunce took a long pull at the whiskey, and brushed the cigar ash from his capacious waistcoat, and attacked the subject with fresh vigour.

”There ain't no finding out anything about no one, without you take a bit o' trouble,” he remarked wisely. ”Mayhap Mr. Austen, yonder, might know a something more than us folk. Hasn't he got never a father, now? There's a won'erful lot to be gathered from knowing of a man's father, there is. Like enough he's one o' they London folk, as daren't speak aloud for fear of its getting into the newspapers.

London folk is mighty well watched, so I've heard; there's never a moment's peace or safety in London, some say. Mayhap Mr. Wilton's father is a London gen'leman, now!”

”His father?” said the Rector, with sudden enthusiasm. ”His father was something short of a genius, sir! He is the best authority we have on the numismatics of his neighbourhood. Have you never heard of Wilton's 'Copper Tokens'?”

”Guess we have, sir, pretty often,” laughed Ted.

The Rector looked pathetic, and handed him another cigar, with an apprehension that arose from the distant clang of the garden gate.

”They all laugh at me,” he said in a cheery tone that evoked no one's pity. ”I'm an old fool; oh, yes, we know all about that. But if you had read Wilton's 'Copper Tokens,' you wouldn't want to know who this man's father was. Let me see,--what did I do with my Crockford?”

”I expect you thought it was a hymn-book and carted it up to church this morning,” said Ted, in a tone of forced merriment. He still had one eye on the lawn, and what he saw there did not raise his spirits.