Courtship -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Singers -- Fiction
"Of what are you thinking?" he asked, smiling. And then the swift,
hawk-like glance of the blue eyes brought with it a sudden, sure sense of
recognition, stinging the slumbering cells of memory into activity. A
picture shaped itself in her mind of a blustering March day, and of a
girl, a man, and an errand-boy, careering wildly in the roadway of a
London street, while some stray sheets of music went whirling hither and
thither in the wind. It had all happened a year ago, on that critical
day when Baroni had consented to accept her as his pupil, but the
recollection of it, and the odd, snubbed feeling she had experienced in
regard to the man with the blue eyes, was as clear in her mind as though
it had occurred only yesterday.
"I believe we have met before, haven't we?" she said.
The look of gay good-humour vanished suddenly from his face and an
expression of blank inquiry took its place.
"I think not," he replied.
"Oh, but I'm sure of it. Don't you remember"--brightly--"about a year
ago. I was carrying some music, and it all blew away up the street and
you helped me to collect it again?"
He shook his head.
"I think you must be mistaken," he answered regretfully.
"No, no," she persisted, but beginning to experience some slight
embarrassment. (It is embarrassing to find you have betrayed a keen and
vivid recollection of a man who has apparently forgotten that he ever set
eyes on you!) "Oh, you must remember--it was in Grellingham Place, and
the greengrocer's boy helped as well."
She broke off, reading the polite negation in his face.
"You must be confusing me with some one else. I should not be likely
to--forget--so charming a _rencontre_."
There was surely a veiled mockery in his composed tones, irreproachably
courteous though they were, and Diana coloured hotly. Somehow, this man
possessed the faculty of making her feel awkward and self-conscious and
horribly young; he himself was so essentially of the polished type of
cosmopolitan that beside him she felt herself to be as raw and crude as
any bread-and-butter miss fresh from the schoolroom. Moreover, she had
an inward conviction that in reality he recollected the incident in
Grellingham Place as clearly as she did herself, although he refused to
admit it.
She relapsed into an uncomfortable silence, and presently the attendant
from the restaurant car came along the corridor and looked in to ask if
they were going to have dinner on the train. Both nodded an affirmative.
"Table for two?" he queried, evidently taking them to be two friends
travelling together.
Diana was about to enlighten him when her _vis-a-vis_ leaned forward
hastily.
"Please," he said persuasively, and as she returned no answer he
apparently took her silence for consent, for something passed
unobtrusively from his hand to that of the attendant, and the latter
touched his hat with a smiling--"Right you are, sir! I'll reserve a
table for two."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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