CHAPTER XVI

Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, for she had instantly, in so public a situation, to recover herself.  They had come and gone in half a minute, and she immediately explained them.  “It’s only because I’m tired.  It’s that—­it’s that!” Then she added a trifle incoherently:  “I shall never see you again.”

“Ah but why not?” The mere tone in which her companion asked this satisfied her once for all as to the amount of imagination for which she could count on him.  It was naturally not large:  it had exhausted itself in having arrived at what he had already touched upon—­the sense of an intention in her poor zeal at Cocker’s.  But any deficiency of this kind was no fault in him:  he wasn’t obliged to have an inferior cleverness—­to have second-rate resources and virtues.  It had been as if he almost really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he accordingly put in some kind confused plea—­“You ought really to take something:  won’t you have something or other somewhere?” to which she had made no response but a headshake of a sharpness that settled it.  “Why shan’t we all the more keep meeting?”

“I mean meeting this way—­only this way.  At my place there—­that I’ve nothing to do with, and I hope of course you’ll turn up, with your correspondence, when it suits you.  Whether I stay or not, I mean; for I shall probably not stay.”

“You’re going somewhere else?” he put it with positive anxiety.

“Yes, ever so far away—­to the other end of London.  There are all sorts of reasons I can’t tell you; and it’s practically settled.  It’s better for me, much; and I’ve only kept on at Cocker’s for you.”

“For me?”

Making out in the dusk that he fairly blushed, she now measured how far he had been from knowing too much.  Too much, she called it at present; and that was easy, since it proved so abundantly enough for her that he should simply be where he was.  “As we shall never talk this way but to-night—­never, never again!—­here it all is.  I’ll say it; I don’t care what you think; it doesn’t matter; I only want to help you.  Besides, you’re kind—­you’re kind.  I’ve been thinking then of leaving for ever so long.  But you’ve come so often—­at times—­and you’ve had so much to do, and it has been so pleasant and interesting, that I’ve remained, I’ve kept putting off any change.  More than once, when I had nearly decided, you’ve turned up again and I’ve thought ‘Oh no!’ That’s the simple fact!” She had by this time got her confusion down so completely that she could laugh.  “This is what I meant when I said to you just now that I ‘knew.’  I’ve known perfectly that you knew I took trouble for you; and that knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you, as if there were something—­I don’t know what to call it!—­between us.  I mean something unusual and good and awfully nice—­something not a bit horrid or vulgar.”