"Dо you like him?"
"I don't think I do very much.
He irritates me a little."
He was not her type at all.
He was short, but not thick-set, slight rather and thin; dark and clean-shaven, with very regular, clear-cut features.
His eyes were almost black, but not large, they were not very mobile and they rested on objects with a singular persistence; they were curious, but not very pleasant eyes.
With his straight, delicate nose, his fine brow and well-shaped mouth he ought to have been good-looking.
But surprisingly enough he was not.
When Kitty began to think of him at all she was surprised that he should have such good features when you took them one by one.
His expression was slightly sarcastic and now that Kitty knew him better she realized that she was not quite at ease with him.
He had no gaiety.
By the time the season drew to its end they had seen a good deal of one another, but he had remained as aloof and impenetrable as ever.
He was not exactly shy with her, but embarrassed; his conversation remained strangely impersonal.
Kitty came to the conclusion that he was not in the least in love with her.
He liked her and found her easy to talk to, but when he returned to China in November he would not think of her again.
She thought it not impossible that he was engaged all the time to some nurse at a hospital in Hong Kong, the daughter of a clergyman, dull, plain, flat-footed, and strenuous; that was the wife that would exactly suit him.
Then came the announcement of Doris's engagement to Geoffrey Dennison.
Doris, at eighteen, was making quite a suitable marriage, and she was twenty-five and single.
Supposing she did not marry at all?
That season the only person who had proposed to her was a boy of twenty who was still at Oxford: she couldn't marry a boy five years younger than herself.
She had made a hash of things. Last year she had refused a widowed Knight of the Bath with three children.
She almost wished she hadn't.
Mother would be horrible now, and Doris, Doris who had always been sacrificed because she, Kitty, was expected to make the brilliant match, would not fail to crow over her.
Kitty's heart sank.
XI
BUT one afternoon when she was walking home from Harrod's she chanced to meet Walter Fane in the Brampton Road.
He stopped and talked to her. Then, casually, he asked her if she would take a turn with him in the Park.
She had no particular wish to go home; it was not just then a very agreeable place.
They strolled along, talking as they always talked, of casual things, and he asked her where she was going for the summer.
"Oh, we always bury ourselves in the country.
You see, father is exhausted after the term's work and we just go to the quietest place we can find."
Kitty spoke with her tongue in her cheek, for she knew quite well that her father had not nearly enough work to tire him and even if he had his convenience would never have been consulted in the choice of a holiday.
But a quiet place was a cheap place.
"Don't you think those chairs look rather inviting?" said Walter suddenly.
She followed his eyes and saw two green chairs by themselves under a tree on the grass.
"Let us sit in them," she said.
But when they were seated he seemed to grow strangely abstracted.
He was an odd creature.
She chattered on, however, gaily enough and wondered why he had asked her to walk with him in the Park.
Perhaps he was going to confide in her his passion for the flat-footed nurse in Hong Kong.
Suddenly he turned to her, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, so that she could not but see that he had not been listening, and his face was chalk white.
"I want to say something to you."
She looked at him quickly and she saw that his eyes were filled with a painful anxiety.
His voice was strained, low, and not quite steady.
But before she could ask herself what this agitation meant he spoke again.
"I want to ask you if you'll marry me."
"You could knock me down with a feather," she answered, so surprised that she looked at him blankly.
"Didn't you know I was awfully in love with you?"
"You never showed it."
"I'm very awkward and clumsy.