Chapter XII

Laline met very few people in Kensington Gardens that afternoon.

The wind was keen, and every now and then drifting snowflakes told of the coming storm. The Round Pond was covered with a thin sheet of ice, and upon the green roof of Kensington Palace the snow was lightly strewn.

Laline walked fast, with eyes fixed steadfastly in front of her, absorbed in her own thoughts, holding her cloak together round her, and bending her supple frame to the wind.

It was her first walk unattended in the Gardens, and her errant footsteps led her to a long leafless avenue, through which she walked rapidly, listening to the wind in the branches above her head.

Suddenly mingling with the sound came a voice close behind her, upon hearing which she stopped with a smothered cry and turned a startled face towards the speaker.

Some instinct had told her that she would meet him, and it was to her own astonishment that she realised how glad she was to see him.

"Good-afternoon, Miss Grahame! Isn't it odd? Bad as the day is, I felt certain I should meet you here!"

"And I knew that I should meet you," she returned, quickly, before taking thought; then, seeing the gladness in his eyes, she added, hastily,--

"That is nothing! I have had those presentiments about people ever since I was a child. And they are not necessarily about people I know and like well, but also----"

"About people you dislike--such as I?"

"I was not going to say that, Mr. Armstrong," she said, rather coldly. "'About strangers,' I should have said, although I really think," she added, thoughtfully, "that there is a sympathy of dislike, if one can call it so."

"And so by your sympathy of dislike you knew I should be here, and by my sympathy of like I knew you would be here--and we have met."

This was flirting, of course. Even inexperienced Laline knew that quite well. There was, of course, no harm in flirting with one's own husband; but then he did not know he was that, and must be put in his place.

"I am not good at discussing abstract subjects with strangers," she said; "and, also, I must be getting back home now."

"Just a moment," he pleaded. "I know Mrs. Vandeleur will be at Lady Northlake's conversazione--so that she can spare you; and this keen wind is wonderfully invigorating. Don't you feel the benefit of it after the exotic atmosphere of Mrs. Vandeleur's study? Too much of that can't be good for any one, either physically or mentally; and especially," he added, glancing at her thin face and lustrous eyes--"especially bad for you."

"Why especially bad for me?"

"Because I should think you are exceptionally sensitive, Miss Grahame. What you said just now proved that--I mean about those presentiments."

"Are you exceptionally sensitive, then?" she asked, forcing a little laugh. "For, as I understand, you have presentiments, too."

"Perhaps I am," he answered, slowly, "where some people are concerned. I have an impression about you, Miss Grahame, which is very strong indeed, and about which I want to speak to you."

For a moment Laline's heart seemed to stand still. Was he going to tell her that he had recognised her, and to show himself at last in his true colours?

"Please don't tell me!" she cried, sharply, with an unmistakable tremor in her voice. "It is late, and I am going home. Good-afternoon, Mr. Armstrong!"

"Don't go yet! Just walk once more up the avenue."

"I have not been very much about the world," Laline said, icily, "but I do not think it is customary for young ladies to walk about with strangers."

"I am not a stranger!" he said, emphatically. "Why do you look so startled, Miss Grahame? I can't believe that you and I met for the first time a week ago. If we did, why did you drop that crystal ball in consternation as soon as I entered the room, and why did I feel, as soon as I saw the lamplight on your face, that I had beheld it before? Only my recollection of you is as a child, with long bright hair waving about your shoulders, and----"

"Fancies--mere fancies!" she interrupted. "Mine is not an unusual type of face in England."

"A most unusual type, I call it," he rejoined, earnestly, "and one that I am longing to commit to paper. My body, you must know, Miss Grahame, sits before a desk in a bank all day, but in my mind I am forever drawing and painting, committing lovely scenes and lovely faces very inadequately to canvas."

"I remember," she said, in constrained tones, "that you first met Miss Cavan in a picture-gallery."

"And I remember," he returned, composedly, "how like I thought her to a Paris Bordone. Miss Cavan's colouring is very fine, and there is altogether a Venetian opulence about her appearance. If you are at all interested in pictures, you will see some very good ones when you come, as I hope you will, with Mrs. Vandeleur to my uncle's house next week to tea."

"Thank you," she said, trying vainly to adopt an indifferent 'society' tone. "I am unfortunately engaged that day."

"But no day was fixed," he cried; "and it must be a day on which you are not engaged! I am most anxious that you should know my uncle. You must, I think, be quite his ideal."

"How can you possibly know," she asked, "what my character may be? You forget, Mr. Armstrong, that you know absolutely nothing about me."

"It seems impossible," he said, thoughtfully, "and yet I suppose it is true, as facts go, and that I must have seen that face so like yours, with floating hair, in my dreams. But facts are the least important things in this world, Miss Grahame. It is only by reading between the lines of the facts of his life that we really know any man. A bare summary of events teaches us nothing. We live outside, or, rather, inside of what happens to us."

"Now you are talking like Mrs. Vandeleur," said Laline, interested in spite of herself.

"But don't you agree with me? Here are you and I, as far apart as two fixed stars, each within a little world wherein the other cannot hope to tread, except, perhaps, sometimes in dreams. To show you how little value facts have--I met you, as you say, a week ago for the first time; you just spoke a few words, telling me Mrs. Vandeleur was out and would soon return. I spoke to you; I don't know what I talked about, for I was feeling your presence too deeply to be coherent even before I saw your face; then a light was brought, and I learned your features by heart, every turn of every line of them, before you left the room. And, as I went out of the house, fully an hour later, I saw your face again, pressed against the window, watching me with something in your eyes that looked like dislike and fear. To-day I meet you for the second time, and you speak to me with coldness and dislike in every note of your voice. All that is not much to go upon--is it?"

Although she hated and despised herself for it, her heart went out to him as her ear caught the ring of deep feeling in his voice.

"I don't know what you mean!" she faltered, lamely.

"I mean that such an acquaintance as ours would seem short and slight as mere facts go. And yet the thought of you has never once left my mind since I parted from you, and the moment I close my eyes in sleep you dominate my dreams. You come to me, and in just the voice you speak in now, only less hard and cold, you tell me that something stands between us and prevents you from liking me; and just as I am urging you to tell me what the barrier is, I awake, with my question unanswered."

"I am really not responsible for your dreams, Mr. Armstrong."

"Yet it is your influence which suggests them. Do you never dream yourself?"

"Yes; but I attach no importance to such disconnected nonsense as dreams always are!" she said, hastily, realising, to her intense discomfiture, that she was suddenly growing crimson.

"But tell me," he said, earnestly, "just for curiosity, as I know that you are interested in all psychic studies, whether you ever dream of strangers whom you dislike--of me, for instance?"

"It is beginning to snow," said Laline, staring up in the sky and ignoring his question, "and I have no umbrella."

"But I have. You must let me hold it over you."

And, almost before she guessed his intention, he had opened his umbrella and drawn her hand through his arm.

"You can't get wet now," he said.

"Would you like really to know what I think of you?" Laline asked, in a low and rather unsteady voice.

"Yes--even though I am sure it will hurt me!"

"I think," she said, with much deliberation, "that, in a very cruel and cowardly manner, you are taking advantage of the fact that I am a friendless dependant to treat me with a flirting familiarity which you would not dare to show towards a lady whom you considered your equal!"

He could feel that the hand on his arm was quivering, as was her whole frame, with excitement and anger.

"Is that what you think of me?" he asked, quietly.

"It is. And, if you wish me to retain any respect for you, or ever to speak to you when I am forced to meet you in my employer's house, you will leave me at once, Mr. Armstrong."

"Surely not in the snow, without an umbrella?" he suggested, still unmoved.

She withdrew her hand sharply from his arm, biting her lips with vexation.

"I cannot run away from you," she began.

"I should certainly run after you, and that would look absurd!" he put in.

"I shall be compelled to speak about you to Mrs. Vandeleur," Laline said, beginning to walk rapidly homewards.

"I hope and intend to speak of you to Mrs. Vandeleur very shortly," said Wallace Armstrong.

She turned and stared at him in surprise.

"You mean to speak to Mrs. Vandeleur about me? I don't understand you!"

"No; you don't in the least understand me, or you would never have spoken to me as you did just now! If you will only be good and come under the umbrella again and take my arm, I will explain. Miss Grahame, I force my attentions and my society upon you, and behave with what you call flirting familiarity, because I am not much used to courting, and it's the only method I know. Finding you here alone was far too good a chance to miss, so you must forgive me if I have hurried the pace a little. It may be a very long time before I have such an opportunity again."

"I have not the least notion of what you mean," she said, haughtily.

"Then I will speak more plainly. I have fallen in love with you, Miss Grahame. It seems to me that I have been in love with you for years; but, as you say that is impossible, I will only date it from last week. It was not only that I saw and spoke to you, but I heard your character described in a few words by Mrs. Vandeleur, who, for all her touch of charlatanism, understands the natures of those about her. Shall I tell you her words? She said you were 'a creature of perfect purity and truth, unsullied by thoughts of love or money.' Thoughts of love would only sweeten, and not sully, such a character; but let that pass. I love you, Miss Grahame, and I want in time to persuade you to love me. That is the explanation of what you call my cowardly and offensive conduct."

Laline stopped short in her walk and looked at him intently. It was past five o'clock, but the sky was lighter since the snowfall and she could see his face clearly, the broad forehead and straight nose, the square outline, firm jaw, and handsome mouth softened now into tenderness, the clear olive skin and crisply curling black hair. Every feature seemed refined and idealised from what she remembered of the man a few years before, at which time his mouth was hidden under a heavy moustache and his brow darkened by loosely-falling hair. Only the eyes were the same in shape and colour, a clear blue, under the unusual setting of jet-black lashes and eyebrows; but in Wallace Armstrong's eyes, as they now met those of Laline's, a soft light was shining, making them unlike any she had ever yet beheld. And, as she gazed, this proud and self-reliant maiden, who so much wished to convince herself that she could never forgive this man, experienced the most unaccountable desire to creep into his arms under the protecting umbrella and whisper in his ear that she was not in the least angry with him and was really his wife all the time.

This sudden impulse Laline strongly combated. What right had this man, who knew himself to be married, to go about making love to unsuspecting girls? she asked herself, steeling her heart against him and reminding herself that to Clare also he had in all probability made similar overtures.

"I will try to forget all the absurd things you have said, Mr. Armstrong," she was beginning very gravely, when again he interrupted her.

"That is just what I don't want you to do! I want you, on the contrary, to remember every word, and to think of me when you get home, and try to get used to the idea of me. Then when you come to tea next week at my uncle's house----"

"I cannot come, as I told you, Mr. Armstrong. Dependants are not in the habit of making social calls with their employers."

"If you so greatly resent being in a position of what you call dependance, surely you will not be unwilling to change it?" he suggested.

They were close to the gates at the corner of the Gardens now, and Laline held out her hand.

"Good-bye!" she said. "I prefer to walk to the Crescent alone."

"Good-bye!" he said, and held her hand close in his. "But I can't quite let you go like this," he added, deprecatingly, still retaining her hand. "You haven't even told me whether you mean to leave off disliking me."

"I have told you before that I much object to that flirting manner!" she said, severely.

"And I have told you," he retorted, "that it's the only manner I know--or that I dare employ!" he added, in a lower voice.

"If you wish to be a friend of mine----"

"I wish to be more than a friend."

"Really, Mr. Armstrong, this is absurd! Please let my hand go at once. I cannot stand here with you like----"

"Like lovers?"

"Like two people in a Christmas number."

"I can't let you go until you promise to try and like me."

"You tell me of your dreams and presentiments and fancies," she said, with sudden fire; "perhaps I, too, have fanciful ideas about people, and in my mind may have just as much reason for disliking you as you have for liking me!"

"Not liking--loving."

"Well, and not disliking--hating!" she cried, drawing her hand sharply away from his.

"I would rather you hated me than that you were indifferent--extremes meet. You will come to my uncle's, will you not, Miss Grahame?"

"Extremes meet, but we need not!" she returned, with a sudden school-girl pertness, which made him burst out laughing. Before he had recovered his gravity she had dashed past him through the park gate, and in a few minutes' time had arrived, breathless, before the doors of 21, Queen Mary Crescent.

Up to her own room she ran as soon as Susan opened the front door.

"I declare," she exclaimed, as she saw her blushing face in the glass, "I look like a jubilant nursemaid who has just parted from her 'young man'! And so I have, I suppose; but the odd part of it is that I don't seem to feel afraid of him now. I even have a sort of sneaking regard for him--almost a liking, it might be called, if I didn't know what a fearfully bad man he is. He must be a marvellously clever actor, for he doesn't look in the least cruel or callous, or like a forger or drunkard or bully. I remember I always thought that he was very handsome, and that he had the most beautiful blue eyes. I suppose he must have come right over to England when I disappeared, and persuaded his uncle to forgive him, and reformed. He half-recognised me as soon as he saw me; but he doesn't realise that growing up and putting my hair up have altered me just as shaving his moustache and having his hair out have altered him. He must know the truth sooner or later, I suppose, and then--will he be glad or sorry, I wonder? Now, of course, he makes love to any girl he pleases, knowing quite well that he is safely married, though nobody suspects it. But if I were to turn upon him in a majestic way and say, 'Sir, I am your wife already!' he wouldn't perhaps be quite so pleased. And, by-the-bye, in all his talk he never committed himself by mentioning marriage, which was very artful of him!"