The Making of a Prig. Evelyn Sharp

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СКАЧАТЬ to Paul as though she had known him all her life, and dropped sideways on the chair at the end of his bed.

      "I knew you wouldn't mind," she said. "Ted declared you would; but Ted's so awfully dense sometimes, isn't he?"

      Paul was willing to admit that, on this occasion, Ted had been remarkably dense; but he only murmured some commonplace about the correctness of her judgment, and the honour he felt at her discrimination.

      "Oh, I knew!" said Katharine confidently. "I am never wrong about people. Ted is. He makes fearful hashes about people; I always have to tell him who is to be trusted, and who isn't."

      "I should like to know," observed Paul, "how you manage to know so much about people whom you have never seen before—myself, for instance!"

      "But I have seen you before! Oh, I forgot; of course, you didn't know. I was with daddy last night when he came to fetch you. Don't you remember? I suppose you were too bad to notice much."

      "That must have been it," assented Paul. "I just remember some one supporting my head, or it may have been my shoulders—"

      "It was your head. That was me!" cried Katharine, with animation. "Wasn't Ted jealous when I told him—that's all!"

      "I wasn't," said Ted. "But it was just like Kitty. Girls always do have all the luck."

      "I am glad," said Paul drily, "that at least one of you was fortunate enough to view my discomfiture."

      Ted laughed, but Katharine became suddenly thoughtful.

      "I was very sorry for you, I was really," she said.

      "Oh, no, excuse me—merely interested," said Paul.

      Katharine reflected again.

      "Perhaps I was; how caddish of me!" she said, and looked at him doubtfully. Paul raised his eyebrows; to be taken seriously by a woman, at such an early stage of her acquaintance, was a new experience to him.

      "Oh, please," he exclaimed, laughing, "don't be truthful whatever you are! It's much more charming to think that you were sorry for me."

      Katharine still seemed puzzled. She turned to Ted instinctively, and he came to her rescue.

      "She thought you were awfully plucky and all that; she told me so. I was rather sick about it, of course; but, after all, it wasn't really worth minding because you were hit up so completely, you see."

      "You are a singularly brutal pair of young people," observed Paul, glancing from one to the other. "I should like you to have the feel of my leg for half an hour. I fancy you would find yourselves 'hit up,' as you are pleased to call it."

      "Oh, but we're not a bit brutal," objected Katharine. "Ted never can help saying what he thinks at the moment—that's how it is. It's because he shows all his feelings, don't you see?"

      "You mustn't think Kitty is unfeeling because she doesn't say things," continued Ted. "She hates spoofing people, and she never says things she doesn't mean. She doesn't always say them when she does mean them; it's rather rough on a fellow sometimes, I think," he added feelingly.

      The garden gate swung to, and they sprang to their feet simultaneously.

      "Shall we scoot?" asked Ted, who seemed the more apprehensive of the two.

      "I suppose so. Bother!" said Katharine regretfully. Ted was already gone, but she still lingered. The flying visit to Paul, instead of satisfying her curiosity about him, had only roused it still more; and she sauntered half absently towards him, without the least pretence of being in a hurry to go.

      "Good-bye," she said, and put her hand into his. It was the first time she had shown any signs of shyness, and Paul began to like her better.

      "Not good-bye," he said lightly. "You will come in again, won't you? We shall have a good lot to tell each other."

      "Shall we?"

      "Well, don't you think so?" He dropped her hand and laughed. It seemed absurd that this child, who behaved generally like a charming tomboy, should persist in taking him seriously when he merely wanted to frivol.

      "I'll come if it won't bore you," said Katharine shortly. She was wondering what there was to laugh at.

      "Can you write a tolerable hand?" he asked.

      "I write all daddy's things for him."

      "Then we'll see if something can't be arranged," he began. He congratulated himself on his tact in helping to gratify her evident wish to see him again; but she baffled him once more by suddenly brightening up, and seizing upon his suggestion before he had half formed it.

      "Could I be your secretary, do you mean? Why, of course I could. What fun! Aunt Esther? Oh, that's nothing. I will manage Aunt Esther. Good-bye."

      She managed Aunt Esther very effectually at supper time, by calmly announcing her intention of becoming Mr. Wilton's secretary. And the Rector's sister, who was a curious compound of conventional dogma and worldly ignorance, and knew into the bargain that it was of no use to withstand her headstrong niece, gave in to her newest whim with a bad grace.

      "Do as you like; I am no longer the head of the house, I suppose," she observed fretfully.

      "Oh, yes, you are, Aunt Esther!" retorted Katharine with provoking cheerfulness. "I only want to be Mr. Wilton's secretary."

      Paul was not so elated as she had expected to find him, when she walked into his room in Miss Esther's wake on the following day, and told him that she had gained her point and was ready to become his secretary. Being such a responsive creature herself, she always expected every one else to share her emotions.

      "Aren't you glad?" she asked him anxiously.

      Not being able to explain that what he wanted was not so much a secretary as a pretty girl to amuse him, he said with his usual smile that he was delighted, and proceeded to dictate various uninteresting letters of a business-like character.

      "So you live in the Temple," she observed, as she folded up a letter to his housekeeper. "Isn't it a gloriously romantic place to live in?"

      "It is convenient," said Paul briefly. And that was all the conversation they had that day.

      He wanted no letters written the next day, and she read the paper to him instead. But Miss Esther stayed in the room all the time, with her knitting, and there was no conversation that day either. On the third day, however, her aunt was wanted in the parish; and she deputed the Rector to take her place in the sick room. She might have known that he would forget all about it, directly she was gone; but Miss Esther always acted on the assumption that her brother possessed all the excellent qualities she wished him to have, and it never occurred to her that he would spend the afternoon in finishing his paper on the antiquities of the county.

      "Aunt Esther has gone to see a poor woman who has lost her baby. I never can imagine why a woman who has lost her baby should be visited just because she is poor. Can you?" said Katharine, as she settled herself on the spare-room window-seat with her writing materials.

      "No," said Paul, concealing his satisfaction that Miss Esther СКАЧАТЬ