Mine for a Day (20 page)

“What nonsense have you been telling that girl?” was his unpromising beginning.

“Which girl? enquired Leila, with her mind circling uneasily round the thought of Rosemary.

“Why, Miss—what’s her name?—Troon. The one who came in to take that last letter just now.”

“I haven’t told her any nonsense!” A feeling of indignation was slowly beginning to rise in Leila’s heart. She was rather tired of being catechized and reproved, she decided, and instinctively she squared her shoulders and looked defiantly at Simon. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Of course you do!” He looked a little as though
he
had had enough, too.
“
She congratulated me on what she was pleased to call my renewed engagement. And when I asked her who had told her about that, she said you had.”

“Well, why not?” Leila was astonished and dismayed to find that her voice sounded positively truculent. But then she was dead tired and very unhappy. “Is it a forbidden subject?”

He started to say something which sounded very angry indeed and was not phrased in strictly parliamentary language! And then suddenly he stopped.

“Sit down, Leila,” he said, in a much quieter tone. “What is the matter, child?”

“N-nothing,” Leila whispered, and she sat down in the chair he put for her, and thought of nothing at all for the next few minutes except trying not to cry.

He stood and watched her in the utmost perplexity, and after a short pause she felt ready for whatever further unreasonable things he might say about himself and Rosemary getting engaged again. So she raised her head and said: “Well?”

But he didn’t revert to that subject. He just said very unhappily: “Do you have to go to Australia?”

“No, she replied, just as unhappily. “I just thought—it was a good idea.”

“Why, in heaven’s name?” enquired Simon, in the tones of a man who was holding on very carefully to his sanity and his self-control.

“Do you really want to know?” she pleated her dress nervously between her thumb and finger.

“More than anything—almost anything else in the world.”

“Well, it’s just that I feel, if you’re going to marry Rosemary, I’d just as soon be at the other end of the world.” Leila said, and began to cry quietly and very humiliatingly.

“But, darling—” Quite incredibly, he was suddenly kneeling beside her chair, with his arm round her. “I’m not going to marry Rosemary. What on earth made you think I was?”

“She’s engaged to you again,” cried Leila accusingly. “You gave her back her ring. She—she’s wearing it.”

There was a long silence. Then he said:

“Since when has she been wearing it?”

“Since—last night. And how could she be wearing it, if you hadn’t given it back to her?”

“By the simple process of never having handed it over to me when she broke the engagement, I suppose,
”
retorted Simon dryly.

“Oh!” Leila gazed at Simon, and wondered confusedly how she had managed, for almost twenty-four hours, to forget how gaily conscienceless Rosemary could be, in the overriding cause of her own wishes. “You mean she—”

Leila stopped, and they both experienced a faint shame on behalf of Rosemary. A shame which, it must be confessed, Rosemary would never have experienced on her own behalf.

“She didn’t give back your ring, when she broke off the engagement?” Leila said at last, as though that were the principal offence.

“It was rather a—sudden break,” Simon reminded her.

“Of course
.”

There was a short silence, and then Leila said: “Perhaps she was joking last night. Just—playing some silly prank, to—to tease me.”

They both knew she had not been doing anything of the sort, of course. The most which could be said for
h
er was that she probably argued that, since Leila had once deceived her, there was no great harm in her returning the compliment. But Simon, faithful, like Leila, to t
h
e cause of giving to Rosemary’s actions a decency which she scorned to impart to them herself, gravely agreed to the possibility of Rosemary’s masquerade having been merely a joke. Leila drew a long sigh.

“Then you’re not going to marry Rosemary, after all?”

“No. I’m going to marry you.”

She sat very still, afraid that something would be said or done which would alter the exquisite simple completeness of that.

“Unless you insist on going to Australia, of course,” he added softly at last.

“Oh, Simon—” She turned and put her head against him. “It was only—desperation.”

“You silly little thing,” he said, and kissed her gently. “How did you think going to Australia would help things?”

“I couldn’t have—watched you and Rosemary all over again. I’d had all of that that I could stand,” she retorted, almost fiercely.

He stopped smiling then.

“I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t know—”

“I didn’t want you to know,
”
she said, with a faint smile. “I was awfully—ashamed of being so much in love with someone who belonged to another girl.”

He held her close, as though he would protect her against the censure of even her own thoughts.

He hugged her remorsefully.

“I’ll never have to be explicit about that particular matter again,” he reminded her. “I adore you, I’m going to marry you, and no misunderstanding, petty intrigue, or ravishing appointment in Australia is going to stand in the way. Is that clear?

“Perfectly clear, she cried, and flung her arms round his neck. “Oh, Simon, I feel there’s so much to explain and excuse. I behaved so badly over Rosemary’s return, I know. But I loved you so much, and she only loved you a little. It must have seemed to you that I behaved in the strangest, most shameless way, only—”

“Darling, don’t let’s try to go over all that now,” he interrupted. “I was such a purblind idiot that I didn’t realize at first what had prompted you. I just thought it was the most extraordinary interference in my affairs. But, when I realized—and dared to hope that it was because you loved me—I didn’t know how to recapture the lovely intimate friendliness there had been between us. Sometimes I thought I’d lost you. Sometimes I thought I was a conceited ass ever to suppose that I had had you. It was the most ghastly mixup. Then, providentially in a way, poor darling Mother was worse—
”

“It wasn’t Providence,” Leila put in.

“What was it, then?”

“Maternal acumen.”

“Good lord!” Simon said, and laughed in the faintly shocked way nice sons do laugh, when they realize how wily their mothers can be. “Anyway, it was on the drive down yesterday evening that I began to hope. And by the time I said good night to you I was certain.”

“So was I, Simon. So was I! You can’t imagine what I felt like, when I came home to find Rosemary wearing your ring again.”

“Yes, I can,” he countered. “Much the same as the way I felt when you informed me casually that you were going to Australia.”

She laughed remorsefully.

“It wasn’t casually," she murmured. But he refused to prolong that argument.

“Get your things on and we’ll go out and celebrate,” he said.

“But I haven t finished your letters,” she cried, suddenly becoming a conscientious secretary. “Oh, yes, I have! But you haven’t signed them.”

“All right. Fetch them along, and I’ll do them while you get ready.”

“I won’t be long,“ she promised. But when she would have run off, he detained her for one more kiss.

“It’s absolutely all right now, isn’t it?” he said, with unwanted anxiety.

“Absolutely, Simon.”

“No mistakes, changing of minds, well-meant deceptions, or other impediments.”

“None, my darling,” she assured him with a smile. “I’m marrying you just as soon as you can find a secretary to replace me.”

“You gave me a week’s notice this afternoon, anyway,” he reminded her. “I’m keeping you to that.”

She laughed, and ran off gaily to her own office, where Felicity awaited her with a certain amount of anxious curiosity.

“Well”—Felicity turned from the mirror, where she had been doing some running repairs to her complexion,' her lipstick still poised in her hand—“was he as mad as he sounded?”

Leila gathered up Simon’s letters, and looked surprised.

“Mad? No—he wasn’t mad.”

“Well, he gave a marvellous imitation, then. I’ve put my letter with yours. He sounded ready to eat you.”

“Oh, no”—Leila smiled absently—
“
not in that sense.”

Felicity looked at her curiously.

“I thought he was going to haul you over the coals because I said you told me he was engaged again.”

“Well—there’d been some slight mistake about that,” Leila explained tolerantly.

You mean he isn’t engaged again?”

“Oh, yes. He’s engaged. But not to the girl we thought. We just got the girl wrong—that’s all.”

Felicity laughed.

“Slight mistake, as you say,” she said, turning back to the glass. “I like that!”

“So do I, as a matter of fact,” Leila agreed. “Have a nice evening.” And she went out of the room and back along the corridor to Simon.