“Here’s Philip come to take me out. He will sit in the chair there waiting quite placidly till I have finished this letter, not reading the paper or doing anything at all, but just waiting. He knows where there are a pair of golden crested wrens. Isn’t that exciting?... Oh, I can’t go on with him sitting there. Good-bye, my dear. Mind you and Silvia come on the 10th.”
As Peter read, he heard, by some internal audition, Nellie’s voice enunciating the sentences with that familiar intonation of light staccato mockery. The written words were but like a prompter’s copy which he held and glanced at; it was Nellie who stood there and said the lines. He would have liked to argue a point or two with her, but he knew that there was between them that deep fundamental agreement and comprehension without which argument develops into mere contradiction....
Peter thrust the letter into his pocket as steps sounded on the gravel just behind him.
“Been sitting here ever since I left you?” asked Silvia. “Oh, Peter, without your hat in this hot sun!” She picked it up and perched it on his head.
“There! Oh, dear, what a nuisance it is that this is your last day here. But what a last day. Any letters?”
Peter’s hand fingered Nellie’s letter.
“Yes: one from Nellie,” he said. “She wants you and me to go there for the week-end on November 10th. Shall we?”
“Oh, how unkind of her! What are we to do? Shall we say that mother will be here for that Sunday? It will be quite true in its way, though it won’t mean precisely what she thinks it means.”
Peter looked at her below the rim of his straw hat. She had placed it rather forward over his forehead, and as she stood beside his chair he had to incline his head sharply back, so that the muscles at the side of his neck stood out below the sun-browned skin. She came a step closer and held his throat between thumb and fingers.
“What shall we tell her?” she asked. “Speak, or I’ll strangle you.”