"I shall take them to bed with me," said the young lady, with loving
eyes still on the small heels and the green satin; "and I’ll put them
underneath my pillow, and dream of them all the night through."
Mr. Glyn got up. There was a terrible look in his eyes, and a terrible
cold harshness in his voice, as he said:
"I am interrupting your work and your conversation, ladies. Good-night,
Miss Brunel; good-bye, _Miss Featherstone_."
With which he shook hands and departed—to spend the rest of the evening
in walking recklessly along dark suburban roads, wondering whether a few
drops of prussic acid might not be his gentlest and truest friend.
First love had been awakened in Frank Glyn’s heart by the unlucky
instrumentality of Miss Featherstone. Delighted with this new and
beautiful idealism, he was eager to repay her with an extravagant
gratitude for what, after all, was only his own gift to himself. Nelly
knew nothing of this occult psychical problem; but was aware of the
extravagant gratitude, and conducted herself towards it and him with
such results as do not concern this present history.
"You are very hard upon the poor boy," said Annie Brunel.
Nelly pouted prettily, as if she had been ten years younger than she
was, and said he had no business to be so quick-tempered. But after
supper, when they were retiring for the night, and she had grown
confidential, she confessed she was very fond of him, and hoped he would
come again and "make it up."
"I can’t help quarrelling with him, and he can’t help quarrelling with
me; and so we’ll go on, and on, and on——"
"Until you marry."
"No, until I marry somebody else, for the sake of peace and quiet. And
yet I declare if he were to come boldly up to-morrow and insist on my
marrying him, I’d do it at once. But he is always too sensitive and
respectful, and I can’t help teasing him. Why doesn’t he _make_ me do
what he wants? He’s a man, and I’m a woman, and yet I never feel as if
he were stronger than I was—as if I ought to look to him for strength,
and advice, and what not. He’s too much of a girl in his delicate
frightened ways."
Next morning Nelly got a messenger and sent him up to Mr. John Hubbard’s
for Annie Brunel’s boxes, which had been left packed up. Then they two
went out to inspect some lodgings which had been recommended to them by
Miss Featherstone’s landlady. The house was a dingy building in Howland
Street, Tottenham Court Road; but the rent of the two rooms was small,
and Miss Brunel engaged them. She had very little money now in her
purse. Mrs. Hubbard and she had been on so peculiar terms that both
refrained from talking about salary; and when the boxes were brought
down to Nelly’s place by the messenger, no communication of any kind
accompanied them.
"If they want to see me, Nelly," said Annie Brunel, "they will send to
your house, thinking that my address. But I don’t want my address to be
given them, mind, on any consideration."
"But how are you to live, my dear?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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