Dorothy did not answer. Her conscience had given her another and harder jab—she had remembered those wretched, unmade jackboots, and the fact that at least one of them had got to be made to-night. She was, however, unbearably tired. She had had an exhausting afternoon, starting off with ten miles or so of bicycling to and fro in the sun, delivering the parish magazine, and continuing with the Mothers’ Union tea in the hot little wooden-walled room behind the parish hall. The Mothers met every Wednesday afternoon to have tea and do some charitable sewing while Dorothy read aloud to them. (At present she was reading Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost.) It was nearly always upon Dorothy that jobs of that kind devolved, because the phalanx of devoted women (the church fowls, they are called) who do the dirty work of most parishes had dwindled at Knype Hill to four or five at most. The only helper on whom Dorothy could count at all regularly was Miss Foote, a tall, rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five, who meant well but made a mess of everything and was in a perpetual state of flurry. Mr. Warburton used to say that she reminded him of a comet—“a ridiculous blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit and always a little behind time.” You could trust Miss Foote with the church decorations, but not with the Mothers or the Sunday School, because, though a regular churchgoer, her orthodoxy was suspect. She had confided to Dorothy that she could worship God best under the blue dome of the sky. After tea Dorothy had dashed up to the church to put fresh flowers on the altar, and then she had typed out her father’s sermon—her typewriter was a rickety pre-Boer War “invisible,” on which you couldn’t average eight hundred words an hour—and after supper she had weeded the pea rows until the light failed and her back seemed to be breaking. With one thing and another, she was even more tired than usual.
“I really must be getting home,” she repeated more firmly. “I’m sure it’s getting fearfully late.”
“Home?” said Mr. Warburton. “Nonsense! The evening’s hardly begun.”
He was walking up and down the room again, with his hands in his coat pockets, having thrown away his cigar. The spectre of the unmade jackboots stalked back into Dorothy’s mind. She would, she suddenly decided, make two jackboots to-night instead of only one, as a penance for the hour she had wasted. She was just beginning to make a mental sketch of the way she would cut out the pieces of brown paper for the insteps, when she noticed that Mr. Warburton had halted behind her chair.
“What time is it, do you know?” she said.
“I dare say it might be half past ten. But people like you and me don’t talk of such vulgar subjects as the time.”
“If it’s half past ten, then I really must be going,” said Dorothy. “I’ve got a whole lot of work to do before I go to bed.”
“Work! At this time of night? Impossible!”
“Yes, I have. I’ve got to make a pair of jackboots.”
“You’ve got to make a pair of what?” said Mr. Warburton.
“Of jackboots. For the play the school-children are acting. We make them out of glue and brown paper.”
“Glue and brown paper! Good God!” murmured Mr. Warburton. He went on, chiefly to cover the fact that he was drawing nearer to Dorothy’s chair: “What a life you lead! Messing about with glue and brown paper in the middle of the night! I must say, there are times when I feel just a little glad that I’m not a clergyman’s daughter.”
“I think——” began Dorothy.
But at the same moment Mr. Warburton, invisible behind her chair, had lowered his hands and taken her gently by the shoulders. Dorothy immediately wriggled herself in an effort to get free of him; but Mr. Warburton pressed her back into her place.
“Keep still,” he said peaceably.
“Let me go!” exclaimed Dorothy.
Mr. Warburton ran his right hand caressingly down her upper arm. There was something very revealing, very characteristic in the way he did it; it was the lingering, appraising touch of a man to whom a woman’s body is valuable precisely in the same way as though it were something to eat.
“You really have extraordinary nice arms,” he said. “How on earth have you managed to remain unmarried all these years?”
“Let me go at once!” repeated Dorothy, beginning to struggle again.
“But I don’t particularly want to let you go,” objected Mr. Warburton.
“Please don’t stroke my arm like that! I don’t like it!”
“What a curious child you are! Why don’t you like it?”
“I tell you I don’t like it!”
“Now don’t go and turn round,” said Mr. Warburton mildly. “You don’t seem to realise how tactful it was on my part to approach you from behind your back. If you turn round you’ll see that I’m old enough to be your father, and hideously bald into the bargain. But if you’ll only keep still and not look at me you can imagine I’m Ivor Novello.”
Dorothy caught sight of the hand that was caressing her—a large, pink, very masculine hand, with thick fingers and a fleece of gold hairs upon the back. She turned very pale; the expression of her face altered from mere annoyance to aversion and dread. She made a violent effort, wrenched herself free and stood up, facing him.
“I do so wish you wouldn’t do that!” she said, half in anger and half in distress.
“What is the matter with you?” said Mr. Warburton.
He had stood upright, in his normal pose, entirely unconcerned, and he looked at her with a touch of curiosity. Her face had changed. It was not only that she had turned pale; there was a withdrawn, half-frightened look in her eyes—almost as though, for the moment, she were looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. He perceived that he had wounded her in some way which he did not understand, and which perhaps she did not want him to understand.
“What is the matter with you?” he repeated.
“Why must you do that every time you meet me?”
“ ‘Every time I meet you’ is an exaggeration,” said Mr. Warburton. “It’s really very seldom that I get the opportunity. But if you really and truly don’t like it——”
“Of course I don’t like it! You know I don’t like it!”
“Well, well! Then let’s say no more about it,” said Mr. Warburton generously. “Sit down, and we’ll change the subject.”
He was totally devoid of shame. It was perhaps his most outstanding characteristic. Having attempted to seduce her, and failed, he was quite willing to go on with the conversation as though nothing whatever had happened.
“I’m going home at once,” said Dorothy. “I can’t stay here any longer.”
“Oh, nonsense! Sit down and forget about it. We’ll talk of moral theology, or cathedral architecture, or the Girl Guides’ cooking classes, or anything you choose. Think how bored I shall be all alone if you go home at this hour.”
But Dorothy persisted, and there was an argument. Even if it had not been his intention to make love to her—and whatever he might promise he would certainly begin again in a few minutes if she did not go—Mr. Warburton would have pressed her to stay, for, like all thoroughly idle people, he had a horror of going to bed and no conception of the value of time. He would, if you let him, keep you talking till three or four in the morning. Even when Dorothy finally escaped, he walked beside her down the moonlit drive, still talking voluminously and with such perfect good humour that she found it impossible to be angry with him any longer.
“I’m leaving first thing to-morrow,” he told her as they reached the gate. “I’m going to take the car to town and pick up the kids—the bastards, you know—and we’re leaving for France the next day. I’m not certain where we shall go after that; eastern