“Thank you.” But now that he was there, after all his strategy, after saying good-by to Fallaray, driving all the way down the hill from Whitecross and up again into that side road, he didn’t know how to begin, or where. This girl! God,—how disordering a quality of sex! No wonder she had shattered poor old Fallaray.
“Shall we walk along the lane? It turns a little way up and you can see the cross cut in the hill.”
“Yes,” he said. “But there are so many crosses, aren’t there, and they’re all cut on somebody’s hill.” He saw that she looked at him sharply and was glad. Quick to take points, evidently. This interview would not be quite so difficult, after all.
“You came down from town to see Edmund?” She called him by his Christian name to show this man where he stood.
“On the most urgent business,” he said, “I saw you sitting at the side of the fountain. It’s a dear old place.”
She was not beautiful, and she was not sophisticated. That way of dragging in Fallaray’s Christian name was childish in its naïveté. But all about her there was something so fresh and young, so sublimely unselfconscious, so disturbingly feminine, so appealing in its essence of womanhood that he had to pay her tribute and measure his words. He would hate to hurt this girl. De Brézé—Madame de Brézé—how was it that he hadn’t heard of her before? She knew Chalfont. She was staying with Poppy Cheyne. Fallaray had met her somewhere. Odd that he had missed her in the crowd.
“I’ll come to the point, if I may,” he said. “And I must bore you a little with a disquisition on the state of affairs.”
“I’m interested in politics,” she said, with a forlorn attempt to keep a high head.
“Then perhaps you know what’s happened, to a certain extent, although probably not as much as those of us who stand in the wings of the political stage and see the actors without their make-up,—not a pretty sight, sometimes.”
“Well?” But the cloud had returned and blotted out the evening star, and there was the shudder of distant thunder again.