“Your luggage arrived nearly an hour ago,” she said.
He had forgotten that detail.
“An hour ago? Surely not,” he said.
She gave him one more pause in which he could say more, but nothing came.
“You have had tea, I suppose,” she said.
“Yes; Evans insisted on my dropping in to his house, and taking a cup there. That rogue Harry has stopped on. Well, well: we were all young once! You remember the old story I told you about the Colonel’s wife when I was a lad.”
She remembered it perfectly. She felt sure also that he had not meant to tell her where he had been since his arrival at the station.
CHAPTER X
The day was of early October, and Dr. Evans, who was driving his swift, steady cob, harnessed to the light dogcart, along the flat road towards Norton, had leisure to observe the beauty of the flaming season. He had but a couple of visits to make, and neither of the cases caused him any professional anxiety. But it was with conscious effort that he commanded his obedient mind to cease worrying, and drink in the beneficent influence of this genial morning that followed on a night that had given them the first frost of the year. The road, after leaving Riseborough, ran through a couple of level miles of delectable woodland; ditches filled and choked with the full-grown grass and herbage of the summer bordered it on each side. On the left, the sun had turned the frozen night-dews into a liquid heraldry, on the right where the roadside foliage was still in shadow, the faceted jewels of the frost that hinted of the coming winter still stiffened the herbage, and was white on the grey beards of the sprawling clematis in the hedges. But high above these low-growing tangles of vegetation, an ample glory flamed, and the great beech forest was all ablaze with orange and red flame tremulous in the breeze. Here and there a yew-tree, tawny-trunked and green-velveted with undeciduous leaf, seemed like a black spot of unconsumed fuel in the fire of the autumn; here a company of sturdy oaks seemed like a group of square-shouldered young men amid the maidens of the woodland. It had its fairies too, the sylph-like birches, whose little leaves seemed shed about their white shapeliness like a shower of confetti. Then, in the more open glades, short and rabbit-cropped turf sparkled emerald-like amid the sober greys and browns of the withering heather and the russet antlers of the bracken. Now and then a rabbit with white scutt, giving a dot-and-dash signal of danger to his family, would scamper into shelter at the rattle of the approaching dogcart. Now and then a pheasant, whose plumage seemed to reproduce in metal the tints of the golden autumn, strode with lowered head and tail away from the dangerous vicinity of man. Below the beeches the ground was uncarpeted by any vegetation, but already the “fallen glories” of the leaf were beginning to lie there, and occasionally a squirrel ran rustling across them, and having gained the security of his lofty ways among the trees, scolded Puck-like at the interruption that had made him leave his breakfast of the burst beech-nuts. To the right, below the high-swung level road, the ground declined sharply, and gave glimpses of the distant sun-burnished sea; above, small companies of feathery clouds, assembled together as if migrating for the winter, fluttered against the summer azure of the sky.
Dr. Evans’ alert and merry eye dwelt on those delectable things, and in obedience to his brain, noted and appreciated the manifold festivity of the morning, but it did so not as ordinarily, by instinct and eager impulses, but because he consciously bade it. It needed the spur; its alertness and its merriness were pressed on it, and by degrees the spur failed to stimulate it, and he fell to regarding the well-groomed quarters of his long-stepping cob, which usually afforded him so pleasant a contemplation of strong and harmonious muscularity. But this morning even they failed to delight him, and the rhythm of its firm trot made no music in his mind. There came a crease which deepened into a decided frown between his eyes, and he communed with the trouble in his mind.