He spoke with a very kind and serious voice, and with much of entreaty in his tone. But Evie's eyes were still hard and angry; she thought she had never heard so tame a defence.
"This sort of thing has gone on before, then?" she asked.
"Ah! do not force me," pleaded Mr. Francis. "I will go bail, I tell you, on Harry's honesty."
"Certainly I will not force you," she said. "Come, Mr. Francis, this is not a nice subject. Let us have no more of it. That was really Oxford we saw just now, was it? How wonderfully clear the air must be here!"
They passed down through the wood and to the house, where they both turned in. But in a minute or two Evie found she had left a book on the lawn, and went out to fetch it. Tea was laying there, and under the trees, where she had left them an hour ago, were Lady Oxted and Harry, at full length in their garden chairs, both, it would seem, fast asleep. And at that sight a sudden question asked itself in the girl's mind: How could it possibly be Harry they had seen in the wood? And before the question was asked the answer came, and she said softly to herself, "Jim."
Her book was lying close to the sleepers, but she had already forgotten about it, and she turned quietly away, casting one glance at Harry, whose straw hat was lying on the grass, and noticing with a faint, unconvincing sense of justification that his clothes were also of dark-blue serge. But habitually honest, even with herself, she knew that her self-judged case would be summed up dead against her, and she set her teeth for a lonely and most humiliating ten minutes. Without definite purpose in her mind, except that association should be an added penance, she went to the lake, and sat down in the Canadian canoe in which they had played red Indians the evening before.
How could she, she asked herself, have been so distrustful, so malicious, so ready to blacken? She had seen a young man walking with a girl, and she had been knave enough, and also fool enough (which was bitter), to accept the shallow evidence of her eyes when they told her that he was Harry. Had she not been warned against such wicked credulity, even as Elsa had been warned by Lohengrin, by the sight of that slim, handsome groom last night in the stable yard? Had she not said to Harry, "Is Vail full of doubles?" Out of her own mouth should she be judged. A worse than Elsa was sitting in the Canadian canoe. For half an hour at least she had believed that Harry was flirting with a servant girl, that he was capable of leaving her to suppose that he was going to keep Lady Oxted company under the trees, and as soon as her back was turned set off to meet his village beauty. Loyalty! a feeling she professed to admire! How would any girl in her position, who had an ash of what had once been loyalty, have acted? She would have flatly refused to believe any evidence; sight, hearing, every sense would have been powerless to touch her. Harry could not do such a thing. How did she know that? For the present that was beside the point; she knew it, and that was enough. Perhaps—and the warm colour came to her face—perhaps she would come to that presently.
She sat up, and beat the water with the flat of the paddle. "Fool, fool, base little fool!" she whispered, a syllable to a stroke.
Suddenly she stopped, the paddle poised.
"I have never known these little foolishnesses of his mean anything," rang in her ears. So! This sort of thing had happened before.... What? Was she again skulking and suspecting, even after the lesson she had received? She had believed, though only for half an hour, the evidence of her own eyes, and she had suffered for it. Was she now to believe the evidence of somebody else's tongue? Yet Mr. Francis had said it, that dear old fellow, who was evidently so devoted to Harry, so pained at what they had seen. No, it did not matter if the four major prophets had said it. She knew better than all the stained glass in Christendom, and again she belaboured the water to the rhythm of "Fool, fool, base little fool!"