Mrs. Senter had luggage come to meet her here, and she appeared at dinner in our private sitting-room looking quite startlingly handsome, in a black chiffon dress embroidered in pale gold, exactly the colour of her hair. The weather had turned rather cold, however, since the rain at Exeter, so, gorgeous as the moonlight was, she wanted to stop indoors after dinner, and proposed bridge, as usual.
That was the signal for me to slip away. I'd finished "Lorna Doone," which is the loveliest love story in the English language (except part of "Richard Feverel"), so I thought I would go into the garden. I felt moderately secure from Dick, because, even if he really is in love with me, he is as much in love with bridge, and besides, he's afraid of his aunt, for some reason or other. As for Sir Lionel, it didn't occur to me that he might even want to come.
I strolled about at first, not far from the hotel. Then I was tempted farther and farther down the cliff path, until I found a thatched summer-house, where I sat and thought what a splendid, ornamental world it would be to live in if one were quite happy.
By this time the sky and sea were bathed in moonlight, the stone pines—so like Italian pines—black against a silver haze. In the dark water the path of the moon lay, very broad and long, all made of great flakes of thick, deep gold, as if the sea were paved with golden scales.
It was so lovely it saddened me, but I didn't want to go indoors; and presently I heard footsteps on the path. I was afraid it was Dick, after all, as he is horribly clever about finding out where one has gone—so detectivey of him!—but in another second I smelt Sir Lionel's kind of cigarette smoke. It would make me think of him if it were a hundred years from now! Still, Dick borrows his cigarettes often, as he says they're too expensive to buy, so I wasn't safe. Indeed, which ever it turned out to be, I wasn't safe, because one might be silly, and the other might scold.
But it was Sir Lionel, and he saw me, although I made myself little and stood in the shadow, not daring to sit down again, because the seat squeaked.
"Aren't you cold?" he asked.
I answered that I was quite warm.
Then he said that it was a nice night, and we talked about the weather, and all that idiotic sort of thing, which means empty brains or hearts too full.
By and by, when I was beginning to feel as though I should scream if it went on much longer, he stopped suddenly, in a conversation about fresh fish, and said: "Ellaline, I think I must speak of something that's been on my mind for some days."