"I shall be twenty next March, twenty-one next year, twenty-two the year after--twenty-nine in . . . But there. How old are you Annette?"
"I wasn't confirmed until I was sixteen. It made a great change in my life."
"You must be very glad to have Gertrude back again."
"I am." He let the toasting-fork drop against the grate. Annette rushed at him:
"You mustn't burn it. It's for pa's toast-and-water. It must never be burned."
The tricksy spirit which is ever lying in wait for the moment when a man is swollen with vanity pounced on Bennett, and out of buffoonery and high spirits he dodged Annette and held the toasting-fork out of her reach. She clutched at it; he dodged again. In her eagerness she tripped and lunged against him. His arm went round her shoulder and he caught her arm. . . . They stood like that for a second and then he found that he could not let her go. His hand gripped tight and hurt her, but she too had passed from laughing excitement to another strange and melting emotion. . . .
She could see the door; he could not. She saw Gertrude, and wrenched away. He followed her, and in a curious strangled voice that he hardly knew for his own he cried:
But Annette had rushed out of the kitchen and he was alone with Gertrude. He picked up the toasting-fork and held the bread before the glowing coals.
"Making toast for your father's toast-and-water."
Gertrude drew herself up heroically, and with what she took for dramatic intensity she said:
Gertrude sat down with emphatic suddenness. His answer had crumpled her up, but also it acted boomerang-fashion, flew back and knocked the wind out of Bennett. (In a world of liars truth always acts like that.) He was the first to recover and he approached Gertrude with contrition.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't feel myself to-night. Queer things going on inside me and outside. It isn't quite true what I said just now. I do love you. I do, really. But love isn't what I thought it was. I don't know what it is, but it isn't what I thought it was."
"I was not making love to Annette. It was an accident."
Gertrude jumped at the occasion for magnanimity and said:
"Thank you." His heart leaped within him, and privately to his own innermost conscience he whispered delightedly: