"Look here, Miss Mayne," he began awkwardly when a temporary absence of the children, who had run to greet the farm terrier, made intimate speech possible. "I'm awfully sorry for the stupid mistake that Smedley girl made. I feel I am really to blame, although nothing was further from my mind——"
Miss Mayne was silent and Graeme shot a swift glance at her profile which, beyond enabling him to note that her eyelashes were long and curved up a little at the tips, afforded him no comfort. They walked a few paces through clouds of jigging gnats.
"Shall we not talk about it any more?" said Miss Mayne at length.
"I don't want to talk about it. I only wanted to reassure you, in case you might feel any annoyance. You see, they'll have found out the truth by now. They certainly won't waste time making inquiries——" He smiled grimly. "And if anything more comes of it, the worst will be a visit of apology to you from the pair of 'em."
He crinkled his eyes in the sunset light and scanned the figures of the children ahead of them.
"Why!" he murmured. "Of course it's absurd! It's comic! Fancy me——" and stopped on delicate ground.
Miss Mayne smiled too. "I hope I shall be spared apologies. As long as they realise at once—— As you say——" She hesitated and drove the point home. "The idea is—comic! And," she added graciously, "I'm not in the least angry with you."
So ended Graeme's party. He retraced his steps, puffing furiously at his pipe, jolted out of the accustomed orbit of his thoughts as completely as a maiden after her first dance.
On the whole he had enjoyed the afternoon immensely and found himself wondering why he had never done anything of the sort before. They were such jolly kids; the brown-faced, impulsive Cornelius James, aglow with imagination and as affectionate as a puppy; Jane, a feminine edition of him, with thick hair, "bobbed" above the nape of her white neck (he had discovered for the first time the witchery that lies in the back of a child's neck); and Georgina, shy, long slip of a thing with eyes like a fawn and hints of a not-distant womanhood in her quick changes of colour and the pretty immature curves of her young body.
Of Miss Mayne he thought with a queer mixture of compunction and pleasure. She so obviously would have enjoyed the afternoon had it not been for the lamentable business of the ring, and the ridiculous remark addressed to her by Josephine Smedley. Her husband indeed...! Somehow that possible interpretation never entered his head when he suggested temporarily adopting the children. The ring she was still wearing during tea must have been responsible for it. He wished they had got it off with soap and water when she wanted to, instead of leaving it till afterwards. "Comic!" The intonation in Miss Mayne's voice came back to him as she echoed the word. After all, why comic——?