“Oh yes, a very little splash. All splashes are little; but splashes are rare. Most people slide into the water anyhow, and are content to be seen swimming.”
“The world would count you singularly happy.”
“Of course it would; it would be wrong if it did not. But—but what I mean is that I might have been happier, and May might have been happier.”
Manvers looked up in surprise.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Tom sat up and played rather nervously with the tassel of the cushion on which he was sitting.
“Surely it is simple enough,” he said. “I have acquiesced in limitations. May is devoted to me—as much devoted to me as I am to her, I think. But don’t you see there is less of me than there might have been. There is less of me to love and to be loved—God knows, it is all perfect enough in its own scale. But there might have been another scale. And now”—he dropped his hands and sat upright, looking at Manvers—“and now we are measured by yards, not by metres.”
A little wind stirred suddenly in the elm trees by the bank and ruffled the surface of the water. A fish rose in mid-stream beyond the boat, and the current carried the concentric ripples down with it. Behind, the little rambling red-brick house stood sunning its southern front, and on the lawn, in the shadow of a tall copper beech, they could see the glimmer of a figure in a white dress sitting in a low basket chair. Tom turned as he spoke and looked half involuntarily at it.
“Come,” he said; “May will be waiting for us. We are going to have tea early, and then go for a row up the river. We are going to do many pleasant things.”
The boat was anchored among some flowering rushes; a few strokes of the punt pole sent it back to the bottom of the lawn. They strolled up together to where May was sitting, and she welcomed them with that brilliant smile which was so natural to her.