The Rain-Girl. Herbert George Jenkins
stupid of him," she said, "and you've waited?" Her eyebrows were lifted in interrogation.
"I was just investigating," said Beresford, feeling more at ease now that he was able to explain. "It was a sort of game. If there was enough only for one, I would ignore the second cup; if for two, I would wait."
She smiled again and sank into the chair on the opposite side of the fire, holding out her hands to the blaze.
Beresford stood looking down at her, the coffee-pot still in his hand.
She seemed entirely to have forgotten his presence. She certainly was a most amazing creature, he decided; but that was no reason why he should be done out of his coffee.
"Do you take it black or with milk?" he enquired in a matter-of-fact tone.
"I'm so sorry," she cried, looking at him with a start, "I—I——"
He smiled down at her and proceeded to fill the cups. "Did you say black?"
"Please."
Lifting the tray and turning round he found her eyes fixed upon him. With a smile of thanks she took a cup and dropped into it two lumps of sugar. She was still regarding him with serious eyes.
"Didn't you pass me on the road this afternoon?" she asked as he resumed his seat.
"With reluctance, yes."
"With reluctance?" she repeated.
"I wanted to know why you were sitting on a gate on such a day, apparently enjoying it and, frankly, I've been wondering about it ever since. May I smoke?" he concluded.
She smiled her permission as, opening a bag that hung from her wrist, she drew out a cigarette-case. "But why shouldn't any one want to sit on a gate in the rain?" she queried as he held a match to her cigarette.
"I don't know," he confessed, "except that no one seems to enjoy the rain just for the rain's sake."
"That's true," she said dreamily. "I love the rain, and I'm sorry for it."
"Sorry for it?"
"Yes," she replied, "so few people find pleasure in the rain. I've never heard any one speak well of it in this country. Farmers do sometimes, but——" she paused.
"There's generally either too much or too little," he suggested.
She nodded brightly. "In some countries the rain is looked upon almost as a god."
"I suppose it's a matter of whether it gives you vegetables or rheumatism," he said as he lighted a second cigarette.
She looked up quickly; then, with a little gurgling laugh, she nodded.
"In any case I like to sit and listen to it," she said, "and I love tramping in the rain."
Beresford regarded her curiously. What a queer sort of girl and what eyes, they were wonderful. Behind their limpid and serious greyness there lurked a something that puzzled him. They held wonderful possibilities.
"Personally I think less of the rain than of my own comfort," he confessed.
"Auntie always says that I'm a little mad," she said with the air of one desiring to be just. "Sometimes she omits the 'little.'"
"That's rather like my Aunt Caroline," he said, "she holds the same view about me. She calls me a fool. It amounts to the same thing. Directness is her strong point."
"I suppose we all appear a little mad to our friends," said the Rain-Girl with a smile.
"Aunt Caroline's not a friend, she's a relative," he hastened to explain.
The girl smiled as she gazed at the spiral of smoke rising from her cigarette.
"I'm always a little sorry for outraged relatives," she said.
"I'm not," with decision. "Because they've got no tails to wag themselves, they object to our wagging ours."
"But hasn't the last four years changed all that?" she asked.
"You can walk down Piccadilly during the Season in a cap and a soft collar," conceded Beresford, "but that scarcely implies emancipation."
"I don't agree with you," she said smilingly.
"But a change en masse doesn't imply the growth of individuality," he persisted. "If all the potatoes in the world suddenly took it into their heads to become red, or all the cabbages blue, we should merely remark the change and promptly become accustomed to it."
"I see what you mean," she said, and he noticed a slight twitching at the corners of her mouth. "You mean that I'm a red potato, or a blue cabbage."
He laughed. This girl was singularly easy to talk to.
"I'm afraid I'm something of a red potato myself," he confessed. "It's only a few days ago that my aunt told me so. She expressed it differently; but no doubt that was what she meant."
"Oh; but I have to bleach again in a few days," she said. "Within a week I have to meet auntie in London, and then I shall become afraid of the rain because of my frocks and hats." She made a moue of disgust; then, catching Beresford's eye, she laughed.
"Do you live in London?" he asked, grasping at this chance of finding out something about her.
"We're going there for the Season," she said, "to a hotel of all places."
"May I ask which?" inquired Beresford, seizing this opportunity with avidity. "I know most of them," he added lamely.
"The Ritz-Carlton." She shuddered.
"I've always heard it quite well-spoken of," he said with mock seriousness.
"Ugh!" she grimaced. "I so dislike all that; but auntie insists."
"She is conventional?" he suggested.
"As conventional as the suburbs. I'm supposed to be with friends in Yorkshire now," she added with the smile of a mischievous child. "If she could see me here, she would take to her bed with an attack of nerves. Poor auntie! Sometimes I am quite sorry for her," and again the little gurgling laugh belied her words.
"I'm afraid you have convicted yourself," he said. "If you had the courage of your convictions, you would go tramping and let the world know it."
"No," she said; "it isn't that; but during the last four or five years I've given auntie such a series of shocks, that she really must have time to recover. First I went as a V.A.D., then I drove a Red Cross car in France and—well, now I must give way to her a little and become a hypocrite."
"No doubt that is where you got your ideas readjusted."
"Readjusted?" she repeated, looking at him interrogatingly.
"In France," he said. "We all had time to think out there."
She nodded understandingly.
"I suppose it was being pitchforked clean out of our environment," continued Beresford, "and making hay with class distinctions. I went out from the Foreign Office. For some weeks I was a private; it was a revelation."
"Yes," she said dreamily, "I suppose we all felt it."
"You see out there the navvy for the first time in his life asked himself why he was a navvy."
"And the man from the Foreign Office why he was a man from the Foreign Office," she suggested.
"Yes," he smiled, "and I doubt if either was successful in framing a satisfactory answer. Everything was one vast note of interrogation. A new riddle had been propounded to us."
"And you came back looking for an Œdipus."
"Yes," he assented. "I on the open road, others in the workshop and office. The politician knows nothing about reconstruction, because he can view it only from the material standpoint."
She