"You know," she said, "you needn't trouble about _me_."
"I'm not troublin'," he said. "Leastways--that is--" he hesitated and was lost.
"You are," said she, with decision, "if you think you've got to see me home."
He said he thought that, considering the lateness of the hour and the loneliness of the scene, it was better that he should accompany her.
He smiled at the vision of Miss Dymond accompanying herself, at eleven o'clock at night, too--the idea! He smiled at it as if he saw in it something tender and absurd. He knew, of course, for he was not absolutely without experience, that girls said these things; they said them to draw fellows on; it was their artfulness. There was a word for it; Ransome thought the word was "cock-a-tree." But Winny Dymond didn't say those things--the least like that. She said them with the utmost gravity and determination. You might almost have thought she was offended but for the absence in her tone of any annoyance or embarrassment. Her tone, indeed, suggested serene sincerity and a sort of sympathy, the serious and compassionate consideration of his painful case. It was as if she had been aware all along of the frightful predicament he had been placed in by Fred Booty; as if she divined and understood his anguish in it and desired to help him out. That was evidently her idea--to help him out.
And as it grew on him--her idea--it grew on him also that there was a kind of fascination about the little figure in its long dark-blue coat.
She wasn't--he supposed she wasn't--pretty, but he found himself agreeably affected by her. He liked the queer look of her face, which began with a sort of squarishness in roundness and ended, with a sudden startling change of intention, in a pointed chin. He liked the clear sallow and faint rose of her skin, and her mouth which might have been too large if it had not been so firm and fine. He liked, vaguely, without knowing that he liked it, the quietness of her brown eyes and the faint, half-wondering arch above them; and quite definitely he liked the way she parted her brown hair in the middle and smoothed it till it lay in two long, low waves (just discernible under the brim of her hat) upon her forehead. He did not know that long afterward he was never to see Winny Dymond's eyes and parted hair without some vision of strength and profound placidity and cleanness.