§
He might have concluded it even more emphatically if he could have followed him, and seen what he saw when he got round the corner where Sally had been left for a moment—only for a moment, mind you, said Jocelyn to himself indignantly,—and found her the centre of an absorbed group.
She was smiling at two men and a woman, who were smiling and talking to her with every appearance of profound and eager interest. She was, in fact, being polite; a habit against which Mr. Pinner had repeatedly warned her, but, for the reason that it wasn’t a habit at all but her natural inability not to return smiles for smiles, had warned her in vain.
These people, climbing up the hill on its other side and finding her standing there alone, had asked her, their faces wreathed in smiles and their eyes wide with astonishment and delight, the way; and she had only politely told them she was a stranger in those parts, and they were only asking her a few kindly questions, to which she had only answered, ‘’Ere on my ’oneymoon,’ and they were only expressing hopes that she would have a good time, when Jocelyn descended, swift, lean and vengeful, on the otherwise harmonious group.
‘Yes?’ said Jocelyn, scowling round at them. ‘Yes?’
‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, with a gesture of all-including friendliness.
But it was no use her being friendly. Jocelyn was rude. How not be rude, with those two men standing there staring as if their eyes would bulge right out?
‘I was under the impression,’ he said, glaring at them up and down, from the top of their badly hatted heads, along their under-exercised and over-coated bodies to their unsatisfactory feet, ‘that it was possible in England to leave a lady alone for two minutes without her being subject to annoyance.’
‘I’m sure——’ began the woman of the party, turning very red, while the men looked both scared and sheepish.
‘Don’t mind ‘im,’ said Sally sweetly, desirous of mollifying.
‘On the contrary, I assure you that you had much better—much better,’ declared Jocelyn truculently. And again he pulled Sally’s hand through his arm, and again he hurried her off.
‘Really,’ he said, when they were out of sight, and only green fields, empty of everything but cows, were visible. ‘Really.’
He stopped and wiped his forehead.
‘’Ot?’ ventured Sally, timid but sympathetic.
‘To think that I can’t leave you alone a minute!’ he cried.
‘They ask me the way,’ Sally explained.
‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite. And what did you say, might I inquire?’
‘Said as ’ow I didn’t know it.’
‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite.’
‘Bein’, as one might say, a stranger in these parts,’ Sally explained still further, for these repeated quites upset her into speech.
‘Quite,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Quite.’
‘Now don’t say that, Mr. Luke—please don’t, now,’ she begged.
‘Perhaps you, on your part, won’t say Mr. Luke,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Not quite so often. Not more than a dozen times a day, for instance.’
Sally was silent. She mustn’t think of him as Mr. Luke, she couldn’t think of him by his outlandish other name, so she thought of him as Husband. ’Usband’s cross,’ she thought; and withdrew into a prudent dumbness.
He ended by scrambling her through the hedge, and across a field as far from the path as possible; and, sitting her down with her back to everything except another hedge, tried to tell her a few things of a necessary but minatory nature.
‘Sally,’ he began, lying down on the grass beside her and taking her hand in his, ‘you know, don’t you, that I love you?’
Sally, cautiously coming out of her silence for a moment, as one who puts a toe into cold water and instantly draws it back again, said, ‘Yes, Mr.——’ stopping herself just in time, and hastily amending, ‘What I means is, yes.’
‘And you know, don’t you, that my one thought is for you and your happiness?’
Yes, she supposed she knew that, thought Sally, fidgeting uneasily, for though the voice and manner were the voice and manner of Mr. Luke there was somehow a smack about them that reminded her of her father when he was going to do what was known in the family as learning her.
‘Don’t you?’ insisted Jocelyn, as she said nothing. ‘Don’t you?’
He looked up into her face in search of an answer, and his voice faltered, he forgot completely what he was going to say, and whispering ‘Oh, I worship you!’ began kissing the hand he held, covering it with kisses, and seizing the other one and covering it with kisses too, while his ears, she could see, for his head lay in her lap, went crimson.
And Sally, who had already discovered that when Jocelyn’s ears turned crimson he did nothing but kiss her and murmur words that were not, however incomprehensible, anyhow angry ones, knew that for this time she was being let off.