“Why hasn’t this husband of yours fixed the windmill?” he casually asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.
“My husband’s work keeps him away from home,” I explained, promptly on the defensive.
“I thought so,” he announced, with the expression of a man who’s had a pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.
“Then what made you think so?” I demanded, with a feeling that he was in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.
“Instinct—if you care to call it that,” he said as he stooped low over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I’d have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia’s, with its untoward suggestion of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching him pitch shut-out ball.
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, after he’d finished his job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little collapsible canvas bucket.
He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered me.
“I’m going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole,” was what he said. “And then I’m going to fix that windmill!”
“On what terms?” I inquired.
“What’s the matter with a month’s board and keep?” he suggested.