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 It was not only that she had turned pale; there was a withdrawn, half-frightened look in her eyes—almost as though, for the moment, she were looking at him with the eyes of a stranger.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 Europe, perhaps. Prague, Vienna, Bucharest.”
“How nice,” said Dorothy.
Mr. Warburton, with an adroitness surprising in so large and stout a man, had manœuvred himself between Dorothy and the gate.
“I shall be away six months or more,” he said. “And of course I needn’t ask, before so long a parting, whether you want to kiss me good-bye?”
Before she knew what he was doing he had put his arm about her and drawn her against him. She drew back—too late; he kissed her on the cheek—would have kissed her on the mouth if she had not turned her head away in time. She struggled in his arms, violently and for a moment helplessly.
“Oh, let me go!” she cried. “Do let me go!”
“I believe I pointed out before,” said Mr. Warburton, holding her easily against him, “that I don’t want to let you go.”
“But we’re standing right in front of Mrs. Semprill’s window! She’ll see us absolutely for certain!”
“Oh, good God! So she will!” said Mr. Warburton. “I was forgetting.”
Impressed by this argument, as he would not have been by any other, he let Dorothy go. She promptly put the gate between Mr. Warburton and herself. He, meanwhile, was scrutinising Mrs. Semprill’s windows.
“I can’t see a light anywhere,” he said finally. “With any luck the blasted hag hasn’t seen us.”
“Good-bye,” said Dorothy briefly. “This time I really must go. Remember me to the children.”
With this she made off as fast as she could go without actually running, to get out of his reach before he should attempt to kiss her again.
Even as she did so a sound checked her for an instant—the unmistakable bang of a window shutting, somewhere in Mrs. Semprill’s house. Could Mrs. Semprill have been watching them after all? But (reflected Dorothy) of course she had been watching them! What else could you expect? You could hardly imagine Mrs. Semprill missing such a scene as that. And if she had been watching them, undoubtedly the story would be all over the town to-morrow morning, and it would lose nothing in the telling. But this thought, sinister though it was, did no more than flit momentarily through Dorothy’s mind as she hurried down the road.
When she was well out of sight of Mr. Warburton’s house she stopped, took out her handkerchief and scrubbed the place on her cheek where he had kissed her. She scrubbed it vigorously enough to bring the blood into her cheek. It was not until she had quite rubbed out the imaginary stain which his lips had left there that she walked on again.
What he had done had upset her. Even now her heart was knocking and fluttering uncomfortably. I can’t bear that kind of thing! she repeated to herself several times over. And unfortunately this was no more than the literal truth; she really could not bear it. To be kissed or fondled by a man—to feel heavy male arms about her and thick male lips bearing down upon her own—was terrifying and repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince. It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that she carried through life.
If only they would leave you alone! she thought as she walked onwards a little more slowly. That was how she put it to herself habitually—“If only they would leave you alone!” For it was not that in other ways she disliked men. On the contrary, she liked them better than women. Part of Mr. Warburton’s hold over her was in the fact that he was a man and had the careless good humour and the intellectual largeness