“Yes, I suppose you had gone out when I sent down. You can’t come through here—the brambles are so bad. Wait a moment, though.”
Tom gave his gun to the keeper, and trampled down the mixed bramble and bracken. There was one long spray which kept asserting itself again and again straight across the path, waving about two or three feet from the ground. In a fit of sudden impatience Tom seized it in his hand and bent it back among the other bushes. As a natural and inevitable consequence his hand was covered with large prickles.
“Oh, why did you do that?” asked May; “I’m sure you’ve hurt yourself.”
Tom laughed.
“The will is destiny,” he said. “I wish to go this way, and the bramble was in the light. That I got pricked was destiny, but another kind of destiny. We shall meet your father if we go this way.”
To the intensest annoyance of Tom they did meet Mr. Markham in a few moments, walking towards them. The rational thing for him would have been to go round by the path instead of taking a short cut, and poor Tom had pricked his fingers for nothing.
“Capital five minutes I had there, Tom,” said he. “Why, where are you from, May?”
“I’ve just come from the Mills, on my way home to lunch,” said she.
“Oh, but you’ll lunch with us,” said Tom confidently. “We are just going home. Look, there is the house quite close, and we are going to lunch at one in order to shoot again for an hour or two afterwards.”
“Thanks, I’m afraid I had better go home,” said May.