“Where do you want to go to, Constance? I suppose I may as well go with you as”—stay here to be reviled, she was nearly saying, but put it—“as not.”
“All right, come along then,” was the reply. And this compliance having the effect of damming up the stream of the maternal eloquence, the two girls sallied forth.
At any other time, moved by the sheer and wanton contrariety of her disposition, Constance would have declined to profit by this concession—would have delighted to stand by and deftly add fuel to the fire. To-day, however, she had a reason for acting otherwise. And as they gained the tow-path of the river that reason took definite shape—the shape of a youth.
He who stood there waiting for them was a medium-sized youth of about twenty, a good-looking boy, on the whole, with dark hair and eyes of a Jewish type, but remarkable for nothing in particular, unless it was a full, free, and perfectly unaffected conceit—on which latter account Alma was inclined to dislike him; but among Constance’s galaxy of adorers he held, just then, a foremost place. He rejoiced in the name of Ernest Myers.
That he was there by appointment was obvious. He was clad in flannels, and in one hand held the bow rope of a light boat which he had drawn up to the side. With a half smile, Alma understood now her sister’s disgust when she had refused to come out. She, Alma, was wanted to make a third. Well, she didn’t mind that. If it amused Constance to carry on a harmless flirtation with young Myers—for it was not likely she could think seriously of a bank clerk with an extremely limited salary—why should she baulk her? Besides, what were they but a couple of children, after all. So she was gracious to the young man, and allowed Constance to monopolise his conversation and attentions to her heart’s content, earning a subsequent encomium from her sister to the effect that when she chose she could be the very ideal of a perfect “gooseberry.”
They paddled up-stream in the evening sunshine. Alma, by common consent, was voted to the tiller ropes, but as it was neither Saturday nor Sunday, and the personality of ’Arry was comparatively absent, her skill and attention were by no means overtaxed. There was nothing in the clearness of one of the four and a half fine days, which go to make up an English summer, to suggest it—and she had often handled the tiller ropes since—nothing in the green glow of the emerald meadows, or the droop of the pollard willows, to recall the furious, misty, leaden surface of a storm-lashed lake. Yet the recollection did come back to her that evening, and with unaccountable vividness, of the day when, tossing before the howling wrath of the tempest, they had given themselves up for lost. Even the varying demeanour of the different members of their boat’s crew, when thus brought face to face with death—from the cynical indifference of Fordham, to the abject, craven terror displayed by the chaplain, Scott—rose up clearly before her mind’s eye, and looking back upon it all, and upon the days that followed, she was conscious of a strangely blank feeling as of a want unsupplied.
“Hallo!—By Jove! Look out! Excuse me, Miss Wyatt. But you as nearly as possible took us right bang into that boat.”
It was young Myers who spoke. Upon Alma the warning was needed. In the middle of his words she had pulled her right rope only just in time. But as the boat, which they had so narrowly grazed, shot by she obtained a distinct view of its occupants. And they were two, the one a fine-looking, well-built specimen of young English manhood, who was sculling, the other a dark, handsome girl seated in the stern-sheets.
The boats had passed each other, as it were, in a flash. But in that brief moment the faces of both its occupants were vividly stamped upon Alma’s vision. And that of the man was that of none other than Philip Orlebar.
She had seen him, but he had not recognised her. He was bending forward talking to his companion in that airy, half-caressing, half-confidential tone that Alma knew so well. She had seen him clearly and distinctly, but he had failed to recognise her, and for this the droop of her sunshade might account.