Page:Anstey--Tourmalin's time cheques.djvu/64

60 "It is gloomy—how gloomy I know better than you!" ("She might well do that," thought Tourmalin.) "Why did I not see that I was slowly, imperceptibly drifting—drifting?"

"Well," said Peter, with a levity he was far from feeling, "if the drifting was imperceptible, you naturally wouldn't see it, you know!"

"You might have spared a joke at such a time as this!" she cried, indignantly.

"I—I wasn't aware there was a close time for jokes," he said, humbly; "not that it was much of a joke!"

"Indeed it was not," she replied. "But oh, Peter, now we have both drifted!" "Have we?" he exclaimed, blankly. "I—I mean—haven't we?"

"I was so blind—so wilfully, foolishly blind! I told myself we were friends!"

"Surely we are?" he said, retaking possession of her hand; he had entirely forgotten Sophia in the ironmongery department, at Tottenham Court Road. "I—I understood we were on that footing?"

"No," she said; "let us have no subterfuges any more—we must look facts in the face.