"Why didn't you leave it to me?" expostulated Graeme, kneeling beside her. "I'd have explained properly. She misunderstood ... or pretended to."
The girl raised a face from which all vestige of colour had fled. Her eyes were wide and pitiful; she held a sugar basin in one hand, in the other a butter knife.
"But I did explain," she said. "How could I know...?"
"You should have left it to me," repeated Graeme. He put out his hand and took the sugar basin from her. She laid the butter-knife with precision beside the cabbage leaf containing the butter. Their actions were mechanical and inconsequent, as if the kneeling figures were two automata actuated by wires.
"I thought I'd left enough to you," she said. "You laughed it over the first time, as if it were a joke. Perhaps it was a joke. One would rather look at it in that light. But at least you could have made sure there would have been no second misunderstanding. No possibility of my being—being insulted." The colour flamed back into her cheeks. "And you did nothing—nothing." She bit her lower lip to control its trembling.
Graeme forced a wan smile. "There wasn't time, then.... But I will do something—and anyhow, it doesn't matter, really."
"Doesn't matter!" she echoed in frozen tones. "Doesn't matter! You put me in odiously false positions, you expose me to an outrageous insult ... and you—you laugh and say it doesn't matter! Oh, this is intolerable!" Angry tears forced themselves to her eyelashes.
Graeme groped for the hand that fumbled for a preposterous handkerchief (with what care had that little scrap of cambric been selected a few short hours before, and with what unconsciousness of the purpose it would serve!) "Claire! Claire! don't you understand, I want you to marry me."
She whipped to her feet. "Oh, don't be absurd!" she cried. "Do you imagine—is this your idea of doing something? Of rep—reparation for dragging my name—my brother's——" She was weeping now.
From somewhere on the sands below came the voices of the children returning from their bathe. With a wrung heart Graeme realised his chance had gone; the children could see them. Miss Mayne turned her face from the sea. "I'm going for a walk for a few minutes," she said; "will you all start tea?"