"Wet? No," he says, gazing at her with unmistakable admiration. His eyes betray the fact that he would gladly have lifted the small jeweled hand from his arm to his lips; but, as it is, he does not dare so much as to touch it though never so lightly. "Rain does me more good than harm," he says.
"How did you come?" asks she, still charmingly anxious about his well-being.
"I rode. A very good mare, too; though it seemed to me she never traveled so slowly as to-day."
"You rode? Ah! then you got all that last heavy shower," says Dulce, who has plainly made up her mind to go in for compassion of the very purest and simplest.
"My dear fellow!" puts in Roger at this juncture, "you don't half consider yourself. Why on earth didn't you order out the covered carriage and a few fur rugs?"
Gower colors; but Roger is smiling so naturally that he cannot, without great loss of courtesy, take offence. Treating Dare's remark, however, as beneath notice, he turns and addresses himself solely to Dulce.
"To tell you the truth," he says, calmly, "I adore rain. A sunny hour is all very well in its way, and possesses its charms, no doubt, but for choice give me a rattling good shower."
To Roger, of course, this assertion, spoken so innocently, is quite too utterly delicious. Indeed, everybody smiles more or less, as he or she remembers the cause of the quarrel a moment since. Had Gower been thinking for ever, he could hardly have made a speech so calculated to annoy Dulce as that just made. To add to her discomfiture, Roger laughs aloud, a somewhat bitter, irritating laugh, that galls her to the quick.
"I must say I cannot sympathize with your taste," she says, very petulantly, to Gower; and then, before that young man has time to recover from the shock received through the abrupt change of her manner from "sweetness and light" to transcendental gloom, she finishes his defeat by turning her back upon him, and sinking into a chair beside Portia.
"A gleam of sunshine at last," exclaims Sir Mark, at this moment, coming for the third time to the surface, in the fond hope of once more restoring peace to those around.