“Another commonplace.”
“Why you deliberately snubbed me?” she went on, taking no notice of the murmured interruption. “Snubbed me like a brother. Shut me up, in fact.”
“Cool hands, brothers—stick at nothing. Ought to know. One myself. But, I say, wasn’t it odd how we first ran against each other that morning—you and I—when you were drawing?”
Now there was nothing in the foregoing conversation as set down on cold-blooded and unfeeling paper which all the world and his wife might not have heard. Nothing in the words, that is. But were that conjugal impersonality within earshot of these two people coasting along a dismal and desolate seashore at imminent peril of a wetting through, or crouched under the rock to avoid it, much gossip might it have chucklingly evolved, merely from the tone of their voices. For the said tone had that subtle ring about it which meant that the owners of these voices were fonder of each other’s society than either would admit to the other—or possibly to him or herself. And it happened that they had enjoyed a good deal more of that society than was known to anyone outside the mystic circle of three, that mystic three bound together in a tacit bond of fellowship—the safer that the third factor in this sodality was by nature denied the gift of human speech. The summer weather was delightful. Meadow and down, country landscape and breezy seashore, were open to all. A chance meeting, such as that of to-day, developed into a ramble more or less protracted, in the most natural way in the world. What more natural either, than that such chance should by some occult and mysterious process have a way of multiplying itself until matters should have reached such a point that the issue would be momentous for weal or for woe to one or both of these two? And then to think that all this should have dated from the too exuberant wag of a dog’s tail.
“And wasn’t it a shame that you should have led me on to talk about your people—and—and—‘kept dark’—isn’t that what you call it?”
“It was rather a sin,” he answered languidly. “Good discipline, though. Won’t do the confidence trick again to divert the insinuating stranger.”
Olive made no reply. She was thinking what pickle she would get into if her afternoon’s pastime should transpire. But there was a strong spice of the dare-devil in her composition, and life at Wandsborough was apt to strike her as dull at times. And—
And what?
Never mind what—at present.
So they sat there and talked, heedless of time, and suddenly a gleam of sunshine straggled through the curtain of cloud. The rain had ceased, and behind them, to seaward, the squall, which had now passed, rolled further and further away.