The Little Warrior

He tried to take her hand. Jill skilfully eluded him.

“Why, of course I've forgiven you, Derek, if there was anything to forgive.”

“Anything to forgive!” Derek began to get into his stride. These were the lines on which he had desired the interview to develop. “I was a brute! A cad!”

“Oh, no!”

“I was. Oh, I have been through hell!”

Jill turned her head away. She did not want to hurt him, but nothing could have kept her from smiling. She had been so sure that he would say that sooner or later.

“Jill!” Derek had misinterpreted the cause of her movement, and had attributed it to emotion. “Tell me that everything is as it was before.”

Jill turned.

“I'm afraid I can't say that, Derek.”

“Of course not!” agreed Derek in a comfortable glow of manly remorse. He liked himself in the character of the strong man abased. “It would be too much, to expect, I know. But, when we are married —”

“Do you really want to marry me?”

“Jill!”

“I wonder!”

“How can you doubt it?”

Jill looked at him.

“Have you thought what it would mean?”

“What it would mean?”

“Well, your mother —”

“Oh!” Derek dismissed Lady Underhill with a grand gesture.

“Yes,” persisted Jill, “but, if she disapproved of your marrying me before, wouldn't she disapprove a good deal more now, when I haven't a penny in the world and am just in the chorus —”

A sort of strangled sound proceeded from Derek's throat.

“In the chorus!”

“Didn't you know? I thought Freddie must have told you.”

“In the chorus!” Derek stammered. “I thought you were here as a guest of Mrs Peagrim's.”

“So I am,—like all the rest of the company.”

“But — But —”

“You see, it would be bound to make everything a little difficult,” said Jill. Her face was grave, but her lips were twitching. “I mean, you are rather a prominent man, aren't you, and if you married a chorus-girl —”

“Nobody would know,” said Derek limply.

Jill opened her eyes.

“Nobody would know!” She laughed. “But, of course, you've never met our press- agent. If you think that nobody would know that a girl in the company had married a baronet who was a member of parliament and expected to be in the Cabinet in a few years, you're wronging him! The news would be on the front page of all the papers the very next day—columns of it, with photographs. There would be articles about it in the Sunday papers. Illustrated! And then it would be cabled to England and would appear in the papers there — You see, you're a very important person, Derek.”

Derek sat clutching the arms of his chair. His face was chalky. Though he had never been inclined to underestimate his importance as a figure in the public eye, he had overlooked the disadvantages connected with such an eminence. He gurgled wordlessly. He had been prepared to brave Lady Underhill's wrath and assert his right to marry whom he pleased, but this was different.

Jill watched him curiously and with a certain pity. It was so easy to read what was passing in his mind. She wondered what he would say, how he would flounder out of his unfortunate position. She had no illusions about him now. She did not even contemplate the possibility of chivalry winning the battle which was going on within him.

“It would be very awkward, wouldn't it?” she said.

And then pity had its way with Jill. He had treated her badly; for a time she had thought that he had crushed all the heart out of her: but he was suffering, and she hated to see anybody suffer.

“Besides,” she said, “I'm engaged to somebody else.”

As a suffocating man, his lips to the tube of oxygen, gradually comes back to life, Derek revived,—slowly as the meaning of her words sank into his mind, then with a sudden abruptness.

“What!” he cried.

“I'm going to marry somebody else. A man named Wally Mason.”

Derek swallowed. The chalky look died out of his face, and he flushed hotly. His eyes, half relieved, half indignant, glowed under their pent-house of eyebrow. He sat for a moment in silence.