"Oh, I'll make that all right with her," said Roy Lovenant-Smith
hopefully.
She looked at him. He _was_ an innocent! "You know what that would
mean?" she said.
"What?"
"Well, merely that you wouldn't see me again."
His look too rested on her hands. "Why?" he asked.
She straightened herself. "Oh, never mind about it. I'm going now."
He coloured a little. "But I say--Louie--you don't mind my calling you
Louie, do you? I used to, you know.--I should like to see you again."
"Perhaps you'd better not," she said, with great demureness.
"Oh, rot!" he expostulated. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and
then leave her in the lurch!"
"You'd like to see me just once again, to see whether I'd got into a
row or not?"
"That's what I mean."
It wasn't what Louie had meant him to mean, but "Well, once, if you
like," she conceded.
"All right. What about here, at this time to-morrow?"
"I'll see if I can get away from my studies."
"Right. And if I see that chap in Mazzicombe, may I say anything to
him?"
"Please don't."
"Not about not taking his hat off?"
"Oh, they don't trouble about that sort of thing here."
"Well, they jolly well ought. All right, I won't. Good-bye----"
"Good-bye."
He took his board and followed Priddy; she turned back to the college.
She laughed again. At any rate, a lark with a pleasant image was
better than a hole-in-corner, Miss Hastings affair with a gardener.
She would _not_ "coiffe Sainte Catherine."
She duly got her wigging. She was put "on her honour" by Mrs.
Lovenant-Smith not to see the young man again who had betrayed the
confidence put in him. This struck her as quite richly arrogant. To be
put "on your honour" by somebody before whom you stand mute as a fish,
and to have it assumed that you accept the bond, was the _largior
ether_ indeed. Louie did not even feel called upon to say that she
declined to consider herself bound. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith might take her
"off her honour" again. She met Roy scarcely three hours later. The
interview he himself had had with his aunt in the meantime affected
the situation but little; his centre-board was now patched up, and the
withdrawing of the privilege of the carpenter's shed made no
difference.
They met again on the afternoon following that, and again on the one
after that. Louie found herself hoping that Izzard, whoever he was,
would not return from "over there" just yet. Let somebody else attend
to the hair-combing of the Saint.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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