Captain Saltonhall did not agree with her, but he did not say so. They talked, thus, very pleasantly, till the hour for dressing, and after dinner Antonia sang to him and Miss Latimer. “What shall it be, Cicely?” she asked, and Miss Latimer said, “The old favourites, please.” So that Captain Saltonhall, who had only heard her sing Brahms, Duparc, and Debussy, heard now old English folk-songs and “Better lo’ed you could na’ be.” She had a melancholy, sweet, imperfect voice, and though her singing had magic it was the flutelike, expressionless magic of the wood-land. She sang indolently, like a blackbird, and the current of the song carried her. But it was a voice that moved him more than any other voice he knew, and as he sat, impassive, apparently, his hands clasped round his knee, he felt the tears, again and again, rising to his eyes.
Miss Latimer sat staring into the fire. She was dry-eyed. But he felt sure that she, too, was only apparently impassive. He felt sure that these songs had been Malcolm’s favourites, too.
III
THEY were sitting next day in a sunny hollow of the moors. Above their heads the spring air was chill, and as they had walked they had felt the wind; but, sunken in this little, sheltered cup, summer was almost with them and the grass and heather exhaled a summer fragrance. Bevis had insisted on the walk, saying that he could manage it perfectly, and indeed they were half a mile from the house before he had owned that they had gone far enough for his strength; a little too far, he was aware, as they sank down on the grass, and he was sorry, for he knew from Antonia’s face that she was going to talk to him and that all his strength and resource would not be too much for the interview.
“I’ve been thinking, Bevis,” she began at once, sitting a little below him, her hands clasped round her knees. “I want to tell you everything. In the first place, let me be quite straight. I do love you,” she said, without looking round at him. “I am in love with you.”
“Yes,” he assented.
“What happened yesterday morning couldn’t have happened had I not been,” she defined for herself. “Not that I mean it exonerates me.”
“Or me?”
“You don’t need exoneration. You are not unfaithful.”
“No, I’m not unfaithful; and I don’t think you are. But go on.”