This having become evident to Claire after a moment of silence, she withdrew her hand in rather a disappointed way and prepared to attack the situation from another angle.
‘Bill, I’ve come to say something to you.’
Bill was looking at her curiously. He could not have believed that, even after what had happened, he could face her with such complete detachment; that she could so extraordinarily not matter. He felt no resentment toward her. It was simply that she had gone out of his life.
‘Bill, I’ve been a fool.’
He made no reply to this for he could think of no reply that was sufficiently polite. ‘Yes?’ sounded as if he meant to say that that was just what he had expected. ‘Really?’ had a sarcastic ring. He fell back on facial expression, to imply that he was interested and that she might tell all.
Claire looked away down the road and began to speak in a low, quick voice:
‘I’ve been a fool all along. I lost you through being a fool. When I saw you dancing with that girl in the restaurant I didn’t stop to think. I was angry. I was jealous. I ought to have trusted you, but–Oh, well, I was a fool.’
‘My dear girl, you had a perfect right–‘
‘I hadn’t. I was an idiot. Bill, I’ve come to ask you if you can’t forgive me.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that–there’s nothing to forgive.’
The look which Claire gave him in answer to this was meek and affectionate, but inwardly she was wishing that she could bang his head against the gate. His slowness was maddening. Long before this he should have leaped into the road in order to fold her in his arms. Her voice shook with the effort she had to make to keep it from sharpness.
‘I mean, is it too late? I mean, can you really forgive me? Oh, Bill’–she stopped herself by the fraction of a second from adding ‘you idiot’–‘can’t we be the same again to each other? Can’t we–pretend all this has never happened?’
Exasperating as Bill’s wooden failure to play the scene in the spirit in which her imagination had conceived it was to Claire, several excuses may be offered for him: He had opened the evening with a shattering blow at his faith in woman. He had walked twenty miles at a rapid pace. He had heard shots and found a corpse, and carried the latter by the tail across country. Finally, he had had the stunning shock of discovering that Elizabeth Boyd loved him. He was not himself. He found a difficulty in concentrating. With the result that, in answer to this appeal from a beautiful girl whom he had once imagined that he loved, all he could find to say was: ‘How do you mean?’
Claire, never an adept at patience, just succeeded in swallowing the remark that sprang into her mind. It was incredible to her that a man could exist who had so little intuition. She had not anticipated the necessity of being compelled to put the substance of her meaning in so many blunt words, but it seemed that only so could she make him understand.
‘I mean, can’t we be engaged again, Bill?’
Bill’s overtaxed brain turned one convulsive hand-spring, and came to rest with a sense of having dislocated itself. This was too much. This was not right. No fellow at the end of a hard evening ought to have to grapple with this sort of thing. What on earth did she mean, springing questions like that on him? How could they be engaged? She was going to marry someone else, and so was he. Something of these thoughts he managed to put into words:
‘But you’re engaged to–‘
‘I’ve broken my engagement with Mr Pickering.’
‘Great Scot! When?’
‘To-night. I found out his true character. He is cruel and treacherous. Something happened–it may sound nothing to you, but it gave me an insight into what he really was. Polly Wetherby had a little monkey, and just because it bit Mr Pickering he shot it.’
‘Pickering!’
‘Yes. He wasn’t the sort of man I should have expected to do a mean, cruel thing like that. It sickened me. I gave him back his ring then and there. Oh, what a relief it was! What a fool I was ever to have got engaged to such a man.’