第31章

She said nothing for a moment, then, suddenly, she stopped again, dropping her eyes.

"I beg your pardon," she said, very gently; "I care a great deal.

It 's as well that you should know that."

Bernard stood looking at her; her eyes were still lowered.

"Do you know what I shall tell him? I shall tell him that about eleven o'clock at night you become peculiarly attractive."

She went on again a few steps; Miss Evers and Captain Lovelock had turned round and were coming toward her.

"It is very true that I am outrageous," she said; "it was extremely silly and in very bad taste to come out at this hour.

Mamma was not at all pleased, and I was very unkind to her.

I only wanted to take a turn, and now we will go back."

On the others coming up she announced this resolution, and though Captain Lovelock and his companion made a great outcry, she carried her point. Bernard offered no opposition.

He contented himself with walking back to her mother's lodging with her almost in silence. The little winding streets were still and empty; there was no sound but the chatter and laughter of Blanche and her attendant swain.

Angela said nothing.

This incident presented itself at first to Bernard's mind as a sort of declaration of war. The girl had guessed that she was to be made a subject of speculative scrutiny.

The idea was not agreeable to her independent spirit, and she placed herself boldly on the defensive. She took her stand upon her right to defeat his purpose by every possible means--to perplex, elude, deceive him--in plain English, to make a fool of him.

This was the construction which for several days Bernard put upon her deportment, at the same time that he thought it immensely clever of her to have guessed what had been going on in his mind.

She made him feel very much ashamed of his critical attitude, and he did everything he could think of to put her off her guard and persuade her that for the moment he had ceased to be an observer.

His position at moments seemed to him an odious one, for he was firmly resolved that between him and the woman to whom his friend had proposed there should be nothing in the way of a vulgar flirtation.

Under the circumstances, it savoured both of flirtation and of vulgarity that they should even fall out with each other--a consummation which appeared to be more or less definitely impending.

Bernard remarked to himself that his own only reasonable line of conduct would be instantly to leave Baden, but I am almost ashamed to mention the fact which led him to modify this decision.

It was simply that he was induced to make the reflection that he had really succeeded in putting Miss Vivian off her guard.

How he had done so he would have found it difficult to explain, inasmuch as in one way or another, for a week, he had spent several hours in talk with her. The most effective way of putting her off her guard would have been to leave her alone, to forswear the privilege of conversation with her, to pass the days in other society.

This course would have had the drawback of not enabling him to measure the operation of so ingenious a policy, and Bernard liked, of all the things in the world, to know when he was successful.

He believed, at all events, that he was successful now, and that the virtue of his conversation itself had persuaded this keen and brilliant girl that he was thinking of anything in the world but herself.

He flattered himself that the civil indifference of his manner, the abstract character of the topics he selected, the irrelevancy of his allusions and the laxity of his attention, all contributed to this result.

Such a result was certainly a remarkable one, for it is almost superfluous to intimate that Miss Vivian was, in fact, perpetually in his thoughts.

He made it a point of conscience not to think of her, but he was thinking of her most when his conscience was most lively. Bernard had a conscience--a conscience which, though a little irregular in its motions, gave itself in the long run a great deal of exercise; but nothing could have been more natural than that, curious, imaginative, audacious as he was, and delighting, as I have said, in the play of his singularly nimble intelligence, he should have given himself up to a sort of unconscious experimentation.

"I will leave her alone--I will be hanged if I attempt to draw her out!" he said to himself; and meanwhile he was roaming afield and plucking personal impressions in great fragrant handfuls. All this, as I say, was natural, given the man and the situation; the only oddity is that he should have fancied himself able to persuade the person most interested that he had renounced his advantage.

He remembered her telling him that she cared very much what he should say of her on Gordon Wright's return, and he felt that this declaration had a particular significance.