"You generally composed your sermon on the way to church. How you used to frighten me, Horatio! I thought every service would be your last! Do you remember the first time I locked you up on a Saturday morning to write your sermon?" she added, smiling.
"You can laugh about it now, but it was no laughing matter at the time," said Horatio. "I made up my mind I would open the Bible at random and take the first text my eye fell upon—and what a text it was! 'Can'st thou draw out leviathan with an hook?' Do you remember?"
"It was the best sermon you ever wrote," said Harriet, warming to the remembrance, "though perhaps, dear, it was a mistake to dwell on the impossibility of a whale's swallowing anything larger than a sardine."
"Well, it is true, isn't it?" argued Horatio.
"That's what you told the vicar when he took you to task for it after the service," laughed Harriet, "and what was it he said?"
Horatio puckered his face into a frown. "He informed me, Harriet, that it was the business of a curate to preach the Gospel and not to lecture on natural history."
The curate rose and held out his hand. "Come on, Harriet." He drew her to him and put his arm round her affectionately. "Let's play we're back in the old stone cottage at Chale, and you go down into the larder and see if there's anything for lunch and I'll go into the dining-room and lay the cloth."
For answer Harriet, conscious of the moisture in her eyes, gave Horatio a swift sidelong peck which was to a kiss what the shorthand symbol is to a written word, and, together, they descended the echoing stairs of the deserted house.
In the meantime Robert Baxter and Kate Clendennin, returning from the railway station by what the Reverend Horatio Merle might have called a short cut of about twenty miles, took no account of the flight of time. Now they raced madly down a narrow lane whose hawthorn hedges interlaced thickly overhead. Now, as the road passed between thrush-haunted woods, they went very slowly, sometimes standing still for minutes at a time to listen to the notes of the wood birds. Once when a spotted fawn trotted out of the thicket and ambled in front of the motor, they went at half speed for nearly a mile before the frightened creature decided to take to the woods again.
In the last four or five days Kate had seen a good deal of Bob, since her confession to Lionel on the Millbrook links, and she had not over-estimated her powers. Each day he sought her company more eagerly, and while at first she had, without appearing to do so, given him opportunities, now, as far as could be, with a young man who had to give a part of his time to business in London, his movements had come to be coincidental with her own.