“Look. There he is. You can see him,” she whispered, gazing upward. “Ah, he’s gone,” as the bird dashed away. “But, did you notice—he’s got the treble note. I don’t like that. When they get on the treble note it means that we’ll soon hear no more of them.”
“Well, now you’ve told me something I didn’t know. Yes—I noticed the treble call, but I’ll be hanged if I’ve ever noticed it before.”
Melian laughed—that clear, rich, joyous laugh of hers. Incidentally he had noticed that before.
“And I’ve actually been able to tell you some thing you never knew before. You! Well, Mr Varne, I do feel proud.—Wait—look.”
Again she laid a restraining hand upon his sleeve. They had reached the pond head, and on the long expanse of glowing surface the perfect reflection of the tossing greenery overhanging it lay outlined as though cut in silver. A waterhen with her brood was swimming across, and at the shrill, grating croak of the parent bird, alarmed by human proximity, a dozen tiny black specks rushed with hysteric flappings through the surface to bunch around her.
“Aren’t they sweet?” whispered Melian. “Such jolly little black things! I’ve caught them two or three times when we’ve been out in the boat fishing, but they get so horribly scared that I’ve never done it again. I’m so fond of all these birds and beasts, you know, that I hate to think I am bothering any of them.”
Helston Varne merely bent his head in assent. Curiously enough, just then he did not feel as if he could say anything. A wave of thought—or was it a consciousness—such as he never remembered to have experienced before, had come over him. He just let her talk, and was content to watch her. He wanted to absorb this picture and carry it away with him in his mind’s eye; and somehow the idea of having to go away at all, for a long period at any rate, had suddenly become utterly distasteful to him.
He watched her, radiant, animated, lighthearted. He remembered their talk on the road in the evening’s dusk, on the last occasion of his visit. He had intended to revert to it, to find out whether he could do anything to help in relieving her mind. But now, looking at her, the idea seemed out of place. She seemed so utterly happy, lighthearted, and without a care.
And she? She had wished for his presence so that she could put to him the matters that were troubling her, yet now that it was here, somehow or other she could not. But as they wandered homeward through the shaded woodland path, she told him something about her past experiences, and he listened sympathetically, careful not to betray that he already knew all that she was telling him. Then—for the path skirted the pond—they came to the scene of the midnight rescue in the ice; and suddenly Melian stopped, for an idea had struck her.
“Mr Varne,” she said, her eyes fixed full upon his face. “Do you know that the police suspected my uncle of killing the man he had just saved?”