Joan sank back into her chair with a gesture of helplessness, which was all the more alarming because it was so singularly out of keeping with her character. Her eyes sought her husband's and sought them in dismay. Cynthia noticed both the gesture and the look. They kindled a vague terror in the girl. The wide brown plain was as a picture before her. She saw the great wheat-field glistening in the heat, a wind-wheel in a corner above a well, and this man with the evil eyes and the face of malice looking her over from head to foot.
"Yes," she said. "He seemed to be expecting me, and there was something else. He seemed to hate me;" and Robert Daventry with a cry sprang sharply to his feet.
Joan raised a quick warning hand. But the cry had been uttered; and with a sob Cynthia buried her face in her hands.
"I am frightened now," she said. "You frighten me."
Robert Daventry stood over her, clumsily remorseful, and laid his great hand on her shoulder.
"There's nothing to fear, Cynthia," he began. "Joan and I--" he broke off abruptly at a second warning from his wife. "We will pack that man off about his business to-morrow."
"Yes," said Mrs. Daventry. She had mastered her agitation, and now affected carelessness. "We can't really have Cynthia's birthday spoilt in this way."
"No, of course not," cried Robert Daventry, seizing upon this explanation of his distress. But he could not leave it in its simplicity. "It's abominable that Cynthia should have her birthday spoilt. She has only one a year, poor girl. That's what's troubling us, Cynthia. Nothing else. But it's enough to upset us, isn't it? To think that you should actually have your birthday spoilt--by one of my men, too."
So he went on, like a commentator on an ancient text, expanding the explanation, underlining it, and forcing upon Cynthia's intelligence its complete improbability. Even in the midst of her fears she could not but look with amusement toward Joan; and the two women exchanged the smile of their sex at the perennial clumsiness of man.
"He shall go first thing to-morrow morning," cried Mr. Daventry; and Richard Walton quietly rejoined: