About eleven o’clock a little mist had begun to form in the street, obscuring the complete clarity of her view, but through it there still shone the light from behind Captain Puffin’s red blind, and the mist was not so thick as to be able wholly to obscure the figure of Major Flint when he should pass below the gas lamp again into his house. But no such figure passed. Did he then work at his diaries every evening? And what price, to put it vulgarly, Roman roads?
Every moment her sense of being deceived grew blacker, and every moment her curiosity as to what they were doing became more unbearable. After a spasm of tactical thought she glided back into her house from the garden-room, and, taking an envelope in her hand, so that she might, if detected, say that she was going down to the letter-box at the corner to catch the early post, she unbolted her door and let herself out. She crossed the street and tip-toed along the pavement to where the red light from Captain Puffin’s window shone like a blurred danger-signal through the mist.
From inside came a loud duet of familiar voices: sometimes they spoke singly, sometimes together. But she could not catch the words: they sounded blurred and indistinct, and she told herself that she was very glad that she could not hear what they said, for that would have seemed like eaves-dropping. The voices sounded angry. Was there another duel pending? And what was it about this time?
Quite suddenly, from so close at hand that she positively leaped off the pavement into the middle of the road, the door was thrown open and the duet, louder than ever, streamed out into the street. Major Benjy bounced out on to the threshold, and stumbled down the two steps that led from the door.
“Tell you it was a worm-cast,” he bellowed. “Think I don’t know a worm-cast when I see a worm-cast?”
Suddenly his tone changed: this was getting too near a quarrel.
“Well, good-night, old fellow,” he said. “Jolly evening.”
He turned and saw, veiled and indistinct in the mist, the female figure in the roadway. Undying coquetry, as Mr. Stevenson so finely remarked, awoke, for the topic preceding the worm-cast had been “the sex.”
“Bless me,” he crowed, “if there isn’t an unprotected lady all ’lone here in the dark, and lost in the fog. ’Llow me to ’scort you home, madam. Lemme introduce myself and friend—Major Flint, that’s me, and my friend Captain Puffin.”
He put up his hand and whispered an aside to Miss Mapp: “Revolutionized the theory of navigation.”