“I can’t tell you, here——”
“I am rather deaf,” said the bird-feeder, mildly looking up, “and quite elderly. Don’t mind me.”
Still Waters looked as if he could have choked him with his paper-bag.
“We’ll walk about a bit, if you don’t mind,” he said curtly to me.
And it seems to me now that for hours and hours we two walked Battersea Park, talking, talking, still repeating ourselves over “that wire” and “nothing to do with you” and “yes, but I’d at least a right to object to your making me look——” ... Round the lake we went, up and down the path of the river front, on the broad bald grass patches, passing communities of little motherly girls with perambulators and picnic-bags in the shadow of the elms, skirting little boys’ cricket-matches conducted with crooked bats, shrill yells—it was all noise and glare and dust that morning, and I couldn’t really say why we should be walking up and down in it like this, endlessly discussing what had no point, now.... Hadn’t we come, long ago, to the end?
At last he did raise a fresh point.
“Anyhow,” he blurted out, “I stand in your way no longer.”
This roused me beyond all the rest.
“D’you mean,” I cried, exasperated, “in the way of my possibly marrying Mr. Vandeleur?”