Part 19 (2/2)

”Will you let me pay for my dinner? I am a working-woman, and expect to be treated like a man.”

”If you insist. But I hope you will not insist.”

She looked at him for a moment hesitatingly. There was no prudery about Mary Gray. She had become a woman of the world, and she had had no reason to distrust the _camaraderie_ of men or to think it less than honest.

”Very well, then,” she said, ”if you will let me pay for your lunch another time.”

”Why, so you shall,” he answered. For a usually grave young man he laughed with an uncommon joyousness. ”You shall give me one day a French lunch with a bottle of wine thrown in at one-and-sixpence. Mind, I must have the wine.”

”You shall have the wine. But it isn't good form to talk about the price of a lunch you are invited to.”

Laughing light-heartedly, they plunged into a labyrinth of dark streets.

The west wind had brought a gentle rain with it now. It was benignant upon their faces, with a suggestion of gra.s.ses and spring flowers pus.h.i.+ng their heads above the earth. They pa.s.sed by the Soho restaurants, crowded to the doors. They found one at last in a more pretentious street.

Over the dinner they laughed and talked. There was something intoxicating to Robin Drummond's somewhat phlegmatic nature in their being together after this friendly fas.h.i.+on.

”You have a crease in your forehead, just above your nose,” he said, while they waited for their salmon, the waiter having removed the plates from which they had eaten their _bisque_. ”Have the Working Women been more unsatisfactory than usual to-day?”

”I was not thinking of the Working Women,” she answered. ”It is family cares that are on my mind. Supposing you had seven young brothers and sisters whom you wanted to help to place out in the world----”

”Heaven forbid! It's no wonder you look worried. What do you want to do for them, Miss Gray?”

”There's Jim. He's seventeen years old. I think he'd make a very good bank-clerk, but at present he wants to go to sea. There isn't the remotest chance of his being able to go to sea. The question is whether he can get a nomination to a bank. It will be quite a step in the social scale if we can manage it for Jim.”

She looked at Drummond with her frank, direct gaze, and he blushed awkwardly.

”I don't know anything at all about your people, or anything of that sort, Miss Gray, but if I could help----”

”I don't think you could help.” Mary's big mysterious eyes under their dark lashes, under their beautiful brows, looked at him reflectively.

”You see, you don't know anything about us. I am the eldest of a large family. The others are my stepbrothers and sisters. I love them dearly, and I love my stepmother, too. But not like my father--oh, not at all like my father. I would never have left him only he sent me away. Lady Agatha was very good to me. She paid me a disproportionate salary. And besides--after I had been away from them for a time they could really do very well without me. Cis and Minnie grew up so fast. To be sure, none of them make up to father for me. But he was really anxious that I should go. He thought I would be cramped at home, after----” She paused, and then went on: ”He would never think of himself when it was a question of me.”

What she was saying did not greatly enlighten him. But, without a doubt, something would come out of the desultory talk by-and-by.

As he watched her in the light of the electric candle-lamps on the table, which, sending their shaded light upwards reflected from the white cloth, made her face luminous in the shadow of her cloudy hair, he was struck again by a baffling resemblance to someone he had known. Now and again during the months since they had known each other her face had seemed familiar; then the likeness had disappeared; he had forgotten to be curious about it. At this moment the suggestion was very strong.

They had the top of the 'bus to themselves as they went on westward. At this hour the traffic was eastward, and the mist of rain saved them from fellow-travellers. They were as much alone as though they were in a desert, up there in the darkness at the back of the bus, with the long line of blurred jewels that were the street lamps stretching away before them.

They pa.s.sed close to the trees overhanging a square, and the branches brushed them.

”The sap is stirring in the trees to-night,” she said. ”Can't you smell the sap and the earth?”

”I a.s.sociate you with the country and green things,” he answered irrelevantly. ”Can you tell me, Miss Gray, how it is that I who have always seen you in London yet always think of you in fields and woods?”

She laughed with a fresh sound of mirth.

”We met long ago, Sir Robin,” she said. ”I have always been wondering how long it would be before you found out.”

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