The Splendid Folly. Margaret Pedler
as it had arisen, she returned the smile.
"Yes, you did. And you were quite right, too," she acknowledged frankly.
He laughed outright.
"Well done!" he cried. "Not one woman in twenty will own herself in the wrong as a rule."
Diana frowned.
"I don't agree with you at all," she bristled. "Men have a ridiculous way of lumping all women together and then generalising about them."
"Let's discuss the question," he said gaily. "May I?" And scarcely waiting for her permission, he deliberately moved aside her things and seated himself opposite her.
"But you were busy writing," she protested.
He threw an indifferent glance in the direction of his writing-pad, where it lay on the seat in the corner.
"Was I?" he answered calmly. "Sometimes there are better things to do than scribbling—pleasanter ones, anyway."
Diana flushed. It certainly was an unusual thing to do, to get into conversation with an unknown man with whom one chanced to be travelling, and she had never before committed such a breach of the conventions—would have been shocked at the bare idea of it—but there was something rather irresistible about this man's cool self-possession. He seemed to assume that a thing must of necessity be right, since he chose to do it.
She looked up and met his eyes watching her with a glint of amusement in their depths.
"No, it isn't quite proper," he agreed, answering her unspoken thought. "But I've never bothered about that if I really wanted to do a thing. And don't you think"—still with that flicker of laughter in his eyes—"that it's rather ridiculous, when two human beings are shut up in a box together for several hours, for each of them to behave as though the other weren't there?"
He spoke half-mockingly, and Diana, felt that within himself he was ridiculing her prim little notions of conventionality. She flushed uncomfortably.
"Yes, I—I suppose so," she faltered.
He seemed to understand.
"Forgive me," he said, with a sudden gentleness. "I wasn't laughing at you, but only at all the absurd conventions by which we cut ourselves off from many an hour of pleasant intercourse—just as though we had any too many pleasures in life! But if you wish it, I'll go back to my corner."
"No, no, don't go," returned Diana hastily. "It—it was silly of me."
"Then we may talk? Good. I shall behave quite nicely, I assure you."
Again the curiously familiar quality in his voice! She was positive she had heard it before—that crisp, unslurred enunciation, with its keen perception of syllabic values, so unlike the average Englishman's slovenly rendering of his mother-tongue.
"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-à-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."
Diana felt that the acquaintance was progressing rather faster than she could have wished, but she hardly knew how to check it. Finally she mustered up courage to say firmly:—
"It must only be if I pay for my own dinner."
"But, of course," he answered courteously, with the slightest tinge of surprise in his tones, and once again Diana, felt that she had made a fool of herself and blushed to the tips of her ears.
A faint smile trembled for an instant on his lips, and then, without apparently noticing her confusion, he began to talk, passing easily from one subject to another until she had regained her confidence, finally leading her almost imperceptibly into telling him about herself.
In the middle of dinner she paused, aghast at her own loquacity.
"But what a horrible egotist you must think me!" she exclaimed. "I've been talking about my own affairs all the time."
"Not at all. I'm interested. This Signor Baroni who is training your voice—he is the finest teacher in the world. You must have a very beautiful voice for him to have accepted you as a pupil." There was a hint of surprise in his tones.
"Oh, no," she hastened to assure him modestly. "I expect it was more that I had the luck to catch him in a good mood that afternoon."
"And his moods vary considerably, don't they?" he said, smiling as though at some personal recollection.
"Oh, do you know him?" asked Diana eagerly.
In an instant his face became a blank mask; it was as though a shutter had descended, blotting out all its vivacious interest.
"I have met him," he responded briefly. Then, turning the subject adroitly, he went on: "So now you are on your way home for a well-earned holiday? Your people must be looking forward to seeing you after so long a time—you have been away a year, didn't you say?"
"Yes, I spent the other two vacations abroad, in Italy, for the sake of acquiring the language. Signor Baroni"—laughingly—"was horror-stricken at my Italian, so he insisted. But I have no people—not really, you know," she continued. "I live with my guardian and his daughter. Both my parents died when I was quite young."