The droop of a sunshade! On such frail pivots do the fortunes of mankind turn! But for the droop of that sunshade the end of this story might, we trow, have to be written very differently.
“Why, Miss Wyatt! You do look startled!” exclaimed young Myers. “We are well out of it now, though, and a miss is as good as a mile when all’s said and done. But it was a near thing.”
He might well remark on her aspect. The suddenness of the interruption, the unexpectedness of the recognition, had startled every trace of colour from her face. Looking back, cautiously at first, and still under cover of the parasol, she gazed after the receding boat, now a long way astern. Yes, it was him. But who was his companion? Well he had not been slow to console himself, she thought bitterly.
“How very stupid of me,” she replied. “It was, as you say, a near thing. I must not neglect my responsible duties again though.”
But while the two younger members of the trio were in high spirits and laughed and chatted, and bantered each other for the rest of the time they were out, Alma was silent and distraite. And an hour or so later when they landed at the tow-path in the dusk and bade good-bye to their escort and chief oarsman it seemed to Alma that that day had somehow drawn down a curtain across her life. For this brief glimpse of her former lover had stirred her heart with a dull and aching sense of void. She recognised now that she had been fonder of Philip Orlebar than she had chosen to admit, had, in fact, loved him. Well, it was too late now for regrets. She it was who in her scorn and bitter anger had sent him away from her, and now he had already begun to console himself.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
”...For His House an Irredeemable Woe.”
“Well, Francis, and what do you think of that idle, good-for-nothing boy of yours now? He seems in no great hurry to come and see his father—in rather less of a hurry than his father was to go and see him.”