“She isn’t very well to-night,” replied his wife. “Poor child, I told her it was too hot to sit out this morning, and she stayed out too long. It’s only a headache, she says, that will be all right to-morrow. I made her go to bed early and sent her some tea in her room.”
“Well, yes, it has been rather warm to-day,” rejoined Mr Brathwaite. “She ought to be more careful.”
”—And then I heard no end of a cackling on the opposite bank,” continued Hicks, who was narrating how he had circumvented his quarry, “and I crawled along from bush to bush, and came bang into the middle of a lot of guinea-fowl. The ground was black with them—by George it was—perfectly black. Well, the beggars wouldn’t rise; they kept legging it along till I thought I should never get a shot.”
“Well, but don’t you know what you should have done then?” said Mr Brathwaite.
“What?”
“Why, shot one on the ground. They’d have got up then.”
So the evening wore on, and Claverton thought it would never end. Was it a subtle instinct that this would be their last meeting, he wondered, that made Ethel persist in talking to him the whole evening, while Laura and Gertie Wray were singing duets together, with Hicks in attendance turning over, usually at the wrong place, by the way, for which he was rewarded by a half-angry, half-amused glance from Gertie’s big blue eyes? Somehow or other, things reminded him of that earlier time there—before this turning-point in his by no means uneventful life—but he remembered it only as a far-away recollection. Then at last good-night was said all round, and he found himself alone, though not yet, for Mr Brathwaite followed him to his room just to say a more formal good-bye.
“So you haven’t changed your mind about going, Arthur? Well, I didn’t much think you would, and perhaps it’s best, for a time. You’ve got your horse I see, and we can send on anything you may want after you. The women will be sorry when they find you’ve gone. I’ll only say what I did this afternoon—come back when, and as soon as you like, the sooner the better. Good-bye, now, my boy. Don’t take things too much to heart, all comes right in time, as you’ll see when you get to my age.”
Claverton wrung his hand in silence, then the door closed on the figure of the old man. Would he ever see that kindly face and genial presence again?
He went round to the stable to see that his horse was all ready for him in the morning. Yes, there stood the fine chestnut, and it snorted and then whinnied as it recognised its master by the dim light of the stable-lantern. He cut up a bundle of forage and threw it into the manger.