Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/79

 interest even in the people whose names they don’t know.

Next morning they saw him at the station. The 9.1 took the bit in its teeth, and instead of being, as usual, the 9.30 something, became merely the 9.23. So for some twenty odd minutes the stranger not only might have been, but was, observed by four bright and critical eyes. I don’t mean that my girls stared, of course. Perhaps you do not know that there are ways of observing strangers other than by the stare direct. He looked sulkier than ever: but he also had eyes. Yet he, too, was far from staring, so far that the indignant Nina broke out in a distracted whisper: “There! you see! I’m not important enough for him even to perceive my existence. I’m always expecting him to walk on me. I wonder whether he’d apologise when he found I wasn’t the station door-mat?”

The stranger shrugged his shoulders all to himself in his second-class carriage when the train had started.

“‘Simply detestable!’ But how one talks prose without knowing it, all along the line! How can I ever have come enough into her