'Please don't think I want to pry into your affairs,' I said viciously. 'I was only interested in the coincidence that we should meet here like this.'
She turned to me impulsively. Her face had lost its hard look.
'Oh, Peter,' she said, 'I'm sorry. I -am- sorry.'
It was my chance, and I snatched at it with a lack of chivalry which I regretted almost immediately. But I was feeling bitter, and bitterness makes a man do cheap things.
'Sorry?' I said, politely puzzled. 'Why?'
She looked taken aback, as I hoped she would.
'For--for what happened.'
'My dear Audrey! Anybody would have made the same mistake. I don't wonder you took me for a burglar.'
'I didn't mean that. I meant--five years ago.'
I laughed. I was not feeling like laughter at the moment, but I did my best, and had the satisfaction of seeing that it jarred upon her.
'Surely you're not worrying yourself about that?' I said. I laughed again. Very jovial and debonair I was that winter morning.
The brief moment in which we might have softened towards each other was over. There was a glitter in her blue eyes which told me that it was once more war between us.
'I thought you would get over it,' she said.
'Well,' I said, 'I was only twenty-five. One's heart doesn't break at twenty-five.'
'I don't think yours would ever be likely to break, Peter.'
'Is that a compliment, or otherwise?'
'You would probably think it a compliment. I meant that you were not human enough to be heart-broken.'
'So that's your idea of a compliment!'
'I said I thought it was probably yours.'
'I must have been a curious sort of man five years ago, if I gave you that impression.'
'You were.'
She spoke in a meditative voice, as if, across the years, she were idly inspecting some strange species of insect. The attitude annoyed me. I could look, myself, with a detached eye at the man I had once been, but I still retained a sort of affection for him, and I felt piqued.
'I suppose you looked on me as a kind of ogre in those days?' I said.
'I suppose I did.'
There was a pause.
'I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,' she said. And that was the most galling part of it. Mine was an attitude of studied offensiveness. I did want to hurt her feelings. But hers, it seemed to me, was no pose. She really had had--and, I suppose, still retained--a genuine horror of me. The struggle was unequal.
'You were very kind,' she went on, 'sometimes--when you happened to think of it.'
Considered as the best she could find to say of me, it was not an eulogy.
'Well,' I said, 'we needn't discuss what I was or did five years ago. Whatever I was or did, you escaped. Let's think of the present. What are we going to do about this?'
'You think the situation's embarrassing?'
'I do.'
'One of us ought to go, I suppose,' she said doubtfully.
'Exactly.'
'Well, I can't go.'
'Nor can I.'
'I have business here.'
'Obviously, so have I.'
'It's absolutely necessary that I should be here.'
'And that I should.'
She considered me for a moment.
'Mrs Attwell told me that you were one of the assistant-masters at the school.'
'I am acting as assistant-master. I am supposed to be learning the business.'
She hesitated.
'Why?' she said.
