Part 11 (2/2)
Some one was waiting to enter the lift as she stepped out of it. She looked up by chance and caught his eye, and they uttered each other's name in the same breath.
For a moment they stood silent, as they loosed hands again. Katharine had blushed, hopelessly and irretrievably; but he was standing a little away from her, with just the necessary amount of interest in his look, and the necessary amount of pleasure in his smile. Paul was a man who prided himself on never straining a situation; and directly he saw her agitation at meeting him, he a.s.sumed the conventional att.i.tude, entirely for purposes of convenience.
”This is very delightful. Are you staying in town?”
”Yes. At least--”
”Your father well, I hope? And Miss Esther? I am charmed to hear it.
Supposing we move out of the draught; yes, cold, isn't it? Thanks, I won't go up now--” this to the porter, who was still waiting by the lift. ”Which way are you going? Good! I have a call to pay in Gloucester Place, and we might go in the same cab.”
It was pleasant to be ordered about, after taking care of herself for seven weeks, and Katharine yielded at once to the masterful tone, which had always compelled her compliance from the moment she had first heard it.
”Now, please, I want to hear all about it,” he began briskly, as they drove westwards. His manner was no longer conventional, and his familiar voice carried her back over the weary months of last year to the spring when she had still been a child. Somehow she did not feel, as with Ted, that she could not tell him about her failures: it seemed as though this man must know all there was to know about her, whether it was pleasant for him to hear it or not; though, as she told him about her coming to town and her subsequent career there, she made her tale so entertaining that Paul was something more than idly amused, when she finally brought it to an end.
”Do you think I ought not to have done it?” she asked him, anxiously, as he did not speak. He looked at her before he answered.
”I cannot imagine how they let you do it!”
”Oh, don't! That is what that horrid old lady princ.i.p.al said. What could possibly happen to me, I should like to know?”
He looked at her again, with his provoking serenity.
”Oh, nothing, of course! At least, not to you.”
”Why not to me, particularly?” she asked half petulantly. She did not know whether to be pleased or annoyed that he should credit her with the same infallible quality as every one else.
”Because things of that nature do not, I believe, happen to girls of your nature. But of course I may be wrong; I am quite ignorant in these matters.”
She smiled at his show of humility; it was so characteristic of him to affect indifference about his own opinions. But she had learnt something already that day, and she remembered Mr. Parker, and thought that Paul very possibly was wrong on this occasion.
”Every one tells me that. I can't see how I am different,” she said thoughtfully.
”I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you. You could not be expected to see. But it is just that little difference that has probably carried you through.”
Katharine remembered Mr. Parker again, and laughed outright.
”I don't think so,” she said. ”I think it is more likely to have been my sense of humour.”
”You used to laugh like that when I first knew you,” he said involuntarily. She knew that he had spoken without reflection, and she laughed again with pleasure. It was always a triumph to surprise him into spontaneity.
”How jolly it was in those days! Do you remember our tea in the orchard, how we watched Aunt Esther out of the front door, and then brought the things out through the back door?”
”Yes; and how you spilt the milk, and cook wouldn't let you have any more, and our second cups were spoilt?”
”Rather! And how you shocked Dorcas--”
”Ah,” sighed Paul; ”we can never do those delightful things again. We know one another too well, now.”
They allowed themselves to become almost depressed, for the s.p.a.ce of a moment, because they knew one another so well. ”All the same,”
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