“Yes,” she said again, very slowly.  “You were sure I was coming.  You got it all ready.  Been a bit of a sell if I hadn’t come.  You’d have had to set to and eat it yourself....  Or get somebody else to help you.”

She meant “another girl,” but she did not know she meant that until the words were spoken.  Her own meaning stabbed her heart.  That icy knowledge that Keith was sure of her was bitterest of all.  It made her happiness defiant rather than secure.  He was the only man for her.  How did she know there were not other women for Keith!  How could she ever know that?  Rather, it sank into her consciousness that there must be other women.  His very ease showed her that.  The equanimity of his laughing expression brought her the unwelcome knowledge.

“I should have looked pretty small if I’d made no preparations, shouldn’t I?” Keith inquired in a dry voice.  “If you’d come here and found the place cold and nothing to eat you’d have made a bit of a shindy.”

A reserve had fallen between them.  Jenny knew she had been unwise.  It pressed down upon her heart the feeling that he was somehow still a stranger to her.  And all the time they had been apart he had not seemed a stranger, but one to whom her most fleeting and intimate thoughts might freely have been given.  That had been the wonderful thought to her—­that they had met so seldom and understood each other so well.  She had made a thousand speeches to him in her dreams.  Together, in these same dreams, they had seen and done innumerable things together, always in perfect confidence, in perfect understanding.  Yet now, when she saw him afresh, all was different.  Keith was different.  He was browner, thinner, less warm in manner; and more familiar, too, as though he were sure of her.  His clothes were different, and his carriage.  He was not the same man.  It was still Keith, still the man Jenny loved; but as though he were also somebody else whom she was meeting for the first time.  Her love, the love intensified by long broodings, was as strong; but he was a stranger.  All that intimacy which seemed to have been established between them once and for ever was broken by the new contact in unfamiliar surroundings.  She was shy, uncertain, hesitating; and in her shyness she had blundered.  She had been unwise, and he was offended when she could least afford to have him so offended.  It took much resolution upon Jenny’s part to essay the recovery of lost ground.  But the tension was the worse for this mistake, and she suffered the more because of her anxious emotions.

“Oh, well,” she said at last, as calmly as she could.  “I daresay we should have managed.  I mightn’t have come.  But I’ve come, and you had all these beautiful things ready; and....”  Her courage to be severe abruptly failed; and lamely she concluded:  “And it’s simply like fairyland....  I’m ever so happy.”

Keith grinned again, showing perfect white teeth.  For a moment he looked, Jenny thought, quite eager.  Or was that only her fancy because she so desired to see it?  She shook her head; and that drew Keith’s eye.