“Why, Laura! what is the matter? You speak as if you did not believe we would—have a good time, I mean. Why should we not? We shall be together, and I don’t know what I should do if you were to go away from me now—darling.”
“Stop, Phil. Don’t say any more—at least not here,” she added hurriedly. “You are much too impulsive, and you don’t know me yet, although you think you do. Yes, we will have a good time—but—don’t begin to get serious, that’s a good boy.”
Philip stared. But her unexpected rejoinder had its effect. Did she intend that it should? The fervour of his tone deepened as he replied—
“I won’t say a word that you would rather I did not, dear. Not now, at any rate.”
“You had better not, believe me,” she replied, in a tone that was almost a caress, and with a smile that set all his pulses tingling. Very alluring she looked, her dark beauty set off by her dress of creamy white, by the languorous attitude, so harmonious with the sunshine and surroundings. Overhead and around the great mountains towered, the mighty cone of the giant Matterhorn dominating them all as he frowned aloft from the liquid blue; the dull thunder of the seething Visp churning its way through emerald pasture-lands; the picturesque brown roofs of the châlets; the aromatic scent of the pines—all harmonising in idyllic beauty with the figure to which they constituted a frame, a background. Did it recall that other soft golden summer evening, not so very long ago either, when he listened to much the same answer framed by another pair of lips? Who may tell? For one nail drives out another, and a heart taken at the rebound is easily caught. Yet assuredly it was a strange, a grim, irony of fate, that which brought these two hither, to this spot of all others, to enact this scene. But in such cycles do the events of life move.
Chapter Twenty Seven.
The Droop of a Sunshade.
Alma Wyatt was at home again—was once more an inmate of the much-decried semi-detached which was an exact counterpart of all the Rosebanks, and Hollybanks, and Belmonts, and Heathfields, which go to line the regulation suburban road.