I can’t think. Getting foolish in my old age, I suppose.”
The stranger laughed. “Surely you are not old.”
“I’m thirty-nine,” snapped out Miss Kite. “You don’t call it young?”
“I think it a beautiful age,” insisted the stranger; “young enough not to have lost the joy of youth, old enough to have learnt sympathy.”
“Oh, I daresay,” returned Miss Kite, “any age you’d think beautiful. I’m going to bed.” Miss Kite rose. The paper fan had somehow got itself broken. She threw the fragments into the fire.
“It is early yet,” pleaded the stranger, “I was looking forward to a talk with you.”
“Well, you’ll be able to look forward to it,” retorted Miss Kite. “Good-night.”
The truth was, Miss Kite was impatient to have a look at herself in the glass, in her own room with the door shut. The vision of that other Miss Kite—the clean-looking lady of the pale face and the brown hair had been so vivid, Miss Kite wondered whether temporary forgetfulness might not have fallen upon her while dressing for dinner that evening.
The stranger, left to his own devices, strolled towards the loo table, seeking something to read.
“You seem to have frightened away Miss Kite,” remarked the lady who was cousin to a baronet.
“It seems so,” admitted the stranger.
“My cousin, Sir William Bosster,” observed the crocheting lady, “who married old Lord Egham’s niece—you never met the Eghams?”
“Hitherto,” replied the stranger, “I have not had that pleasure.”
“A charming family. Cannot understand—my cousin Sir William, I mean, cannot understand my remaining here. ‘My dear Emily’—he says the same thing every time he sees me: ‘My dear Emily, how can you exist among the sort of people one meets with in a boarding-house.’ But they amuse me.”
A sense of humour, agreed the stranger, was always of advantage.
“Our
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