Читать книгу Smith - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

Table of Contents

He did not see the girl coming along the path; nor did she see him. It was her dog, a wire-haired terrier, who discovered Keir, and the dog protested. Maybe he felt himself responsible, as dogs do.

“Peter, come here.”

But Peter still growled and objected to the fortuitous male.

“Peter, you silly ass.”

She appeared before him suddenly, a creature of beautiful fairness, slim and self-sure in her short brown skirt and knitted coat of apple-green. Her skin had the perfect texture of her golden youth, and her hair was like honey. She apologized to Keir. She bent down and took the dog by the collar.

“Sorry. Peter’s so self-important.”

Keir had been lying prone with a book under his chin. He sat up. He was aware of her blue eyes appraising him and his clothes. His clothes were passable, and though his hair might be a little tumultuous, the cult was prevalent.

“Quite all right. I must have startled him.”

His voice betrayed him to her. Being what she was, she knew at once that he did not belong to her world, and though her world was far less distant than it had been, he became for her at once one of the casual crowd. Keir was just a young man with an untidy head and a bicycle, and an environment that was not hers. Less than half a century ago at Cambridge her father and his fellows had cheerfully spoken of all shopmen as cads. Cads on casters.

“Come on, Peter. Sorry he was rude to you.”

Her cold and casual courtesy had other implications. She had slipped a leash through the dog’s collar, and she swept him off, passing away along the grass path to disappear beyond one of the green and white may trees. And Keir sat there with a little, wincing smile upon his face. To her he had been a stranger, but more than a mere stranger, and her dog had growled at him.