She was horrified to discover that she could feel him down her right side like a fever, even though there was a foot of air between their shoulders. Her stomach muscles were tied in knots-not to mention her tongue.
She despised the fact that she could feel none of the ease that Miss Raycroft and the Calvert sisters had felt with him earlier. He was only a man, after all-and a shallow man at that. He was not anyone she would wish to impress. All she need do was be polite.
Not a single polite topic presented itself to her searching brain.
She was twenty-three years old and as gauche as a girl just stepping out of the schoolroom for the first time. But then she never had stepped outside the schoolroom, had she?
She was twenty-three years old and had never had a beau.
She had never been kissed.
But such sadly pathetic thoughts did nothing to calm her agitation.
She might have spent the past eleven years in a convent, she thought ruefully, for all she knew about how to step into the world of men and feel at ease there.
By the time they were halfway to Barclay Court by Peter’s estimation, he had spoken six words and Miss Osbourne had spoken one.
“What a lovely day it is!” he had said as a conversational overture at the outset, smiling genially down at her-or at the brim of her bonnet anyway, which was about on a level with his shoulder.
“Yes.”
She walked very straight-backed. She held her hands firmly clasped behind her back, an unmistakable signal that she did not want him to offer his arm. He wondered if she simply had no conversation or if she was still bristling with indignation because he had compared her to a summer’s day-though he was in good company there, was he not? Had not Shakespeare once done the same thing? He rather suspected that it was indignation that held her mute, since she had been speaking in more than monosyllables with Mrs. Raycroft less than half an hour ago-though he would swear her eyes had never once strayed his way. He would have known if they had since his eyes had scarcely strayed anywhere else but at her.
He had been puzzling-he still was-over that strange thought he had had when his eyes first alighted on her.
There she is.
There who was, for the love of God?
It was a novel experience to be in company with a lady who clearly did not want to be in company with him. Of course, he did not usually find himself in company with lady schoolteachers from Bath. They were, perhaps, a different breed from the women with whom he usually consorted. They were quite possibly made of sterner stuff.
“You were quite right,” he said at last, merely to see how she would respond. “This summer day was not really made warmer and brighter by your presence in it. It was a foolish conceit.”
She darted him a look, and in the moment before her bonnet brim hid her face from view again he was dazzled anew by the combination of bright auburn hair and sea green eyes-and by the healthy flush the fresh air had lent her creamy, flawless complexion.
“Yes,” she agreed, doubling her contribution to their conversation since leaving Hareford House.
So she was not going to contradict him, was she? He could not resist continuing.
“It was my heart,” he said, patting it with his right hand, “that was warmed and brightened.”
This time she did not turn her face, but he amused himself with the fancy that the poke of her bonnet stiffened slightly.
“The heart,” she said, “is merely an organ in the bosom.”
Ah, a literalist. He smiled.
“With the function of a pump,” he agreed. “But how unromantic a view of it. You would put generations of poets out of business with such a pronouncement, Miss Osbourne. Not to mention lovers.”
“I am not a romantic,” she said.
“Indeed?” he said. “How sad! There are no such things, then, you believe, as tender sensibilities? There is no part of one’s anatomy or soul that can be warmed or brightened by the sight of beauty?”
He thought she was not going to answer. They came to the fork in the lane where they had met a couple of hours ago and followed Raycroft and Lady Edgecombe onto the branch that led to Barclay Court.
“You make a mockery of tender sensibilities,” Miss Osbourne said so softly that he bent his head toward her in case she had more to say.
She did not.
“Ah,” he said, “you think me incapable of feeling the gentler emotions. Is that what you are saying?”
“I would not so presume,” she said.
“But you would. You already have so presumed,” he said. He was rather enjoying himself, he discovered, with this curiously serious, prim creature who looked so like an angel. “You told me I made a mockery of tender sensibilities.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought not to have said such a thing.”
“No, you ought not,” he agreed. “You wounded me to the heart-to that chest organ, that mundane pump. How differently we view the world, Miss Osbourne. You listened to me pay you a lavish and foolish compliment and concluded that I know nothing about the finer human emotions. I on the other hand looked at you, serious and disapproving, and felt-ah, as if I had stepped into a moment that was simply magic.”
“And now,” she said, “you make a mockery of me.”
She had a low, sweet voice even when she sounded indignant. She was small in stature and very slender, though she was curved in all the right places, by Jove. He wondered how well she controlled a class of girls, most of whom undoubtedly wished themselves anywhere else on earth but at school. Did they give her a rough time? Or was there steel in her character, as there appeared to be in her spine?
He would wager there was steel-and not a great deal of tenderness. Poor girls!
“I fear,” he said, “that with a few foolish words I have forever condemned myself in your eyes, Miss Osbourne. Shall we change the subject? What have you been doing with your school holiday up until now?”
“It was not really a holiday,” she said. “Almost half of the girls at the school are charity pupils. They remain there all year long and some of us stay too to care for them and to entertain them.”
“Us?” he asked.
“There are three resident teachers,” she told him. “There used to be four until Frances married the earl two years ago. Now there are Miss Martin, Miss Jewell, and I.”
“And you all give up your holidays for the sake of charity girls?” he asked.
She turned to look at him again-a level, unsmiling look in which there might have been some reproof.
“I was one of them,” she said, “from the age of twelve until Miss Martin made me a junior teacher when I was eighteen.”
Ah.
Well.
Extraordinary.
He was walking and talking with an ex-charity schoolgirl turned teacher. It was no wonder they were having a difficult time of it communicating with each other. Two alien worlds had drifted onto the same country lane at the same moment, none too happily for either. Though that was not quite true-he was still enjoying himself. “There is no question of giving up our holidays,” she continued. “The school is our home and the girls our family. We welcome a break now and then, of course. Anne-Miss Jewell-has just returned from a month in Wales with her son, and now I am here for two weeks. Occasionally Claudia Martin will spend a few days away from the school too. But in the main I am happy-we are all happy-to be busy. A life of idleness would not suit me.”
She was a prim miss right enough. She had nothing whatsoever to say about the weather, and had only brief reproaches to offer when he would have spoken of hearts and sensibilities. But she could wax eloquent about her school and the notion of teachers and charity pupils being a family.