“She knows?”
“I told her,” Hartington said. Then, “Have I stolen your news?”
“There is no one left to tell,” John answered, laughing. “I want to tell thousands of people.”
Later, he asked: “Where is Margaret?”
“I don’t know. She disappeared after tea.”
They sat smoking. Everything was pleasant to John now: the click of a cigarette-case being shut, the tapping of the cigarette, the long silences in which none of them had need of speech. The afternoon had begun to fail. The sun slanted yellow across the window-panes and fell in rippling beams of light and shadow upon the pale matting. Outside, the lawn and distant trees had taken on those soft golden tones which, at the approach of summer’s dusk, flow across English fields, investing them with kindly magic. Then the church tower seems more than ever still; the churchyard silent, but not terrible. The bird rustles in the hedgerow; you imagine his bright eyes. The cricket stumps yellow against the green; the shadows flicker on the pitch; the bat sounds clearer, sweeter; the ball runs smoothly, and with peculiar ease; the players and the umpires in their white coats grow nebulous and vague.
“‘And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,’” John said.
“Back in England already?”
“This summer in England!”