I heard them move away. I heard the sound of their lips as they kissed each other, then I turned over on my face and looked down into the forest of grass stems where I found a little ant hurrying impetuously along about his engrossing business. For half an hour I lay there watching him till he was out of sight. I think a divine Providence must have sent that ant. It occupied my mind to see him surmount all his difficulties. And then, just as I watched him disappear into a crevice of the sundial, I heard a scraping of feet and felt a rough tongue licking on my cheek.
It was Dandy. I took him by both shoulders. I set him upon his hind legs, balanced awkwardly in front of me.
"Look at me," said I. "Right into my face." His brown eyes gazed steadily into mine, so steadily indeed as his attitude would permit. "How long did it take you to know me so well that you forgot how ugly I was?"
He shook his head, and he laughed; then I stood up, taking him in my arms like a baby—just as I had done on his release from quarantine in Odessa.
"You're a good fella," said I. "You're a damn good fella."
CHAPTER XIV
I knew that I could not be very far wrong when I said Bellwattle had guessed I was in love. It is so like a woman. They are incapable of climbing to the summit of any other conclusion save this; what is more, they reach it where no foothold for conjecture seems possible.
Who but a woman, from such slender facts as Bellwattle has acquired by dint of persevering curiosity, would ever imagine that I am in love? Thank God, I am not so utterly in need of the mere rudiments of understanding. I know the truth of all that she said to Cruikshank. Women must know me well indeed before they can come to such tender thought of me as to forget that I am ugly. It is true, moreover, that no woman has ever taken the trouble. Why then should I be such a fool as to plunge myself in love?
Yet, as I think over that statement of hers, true as it is, there comes back into my mind that evening on the cliffs when first we met Clarissa. In the look in Bellwattle's eyes, I said, I felt the touch of her hand; what is more, it was only a moment later that she stretched out her arm and held her fingers for an instant round my wrist. Had she forgotten how ugly I was then? It almost seemed so. Then why did she say that to Cruikshank? No—I do not understand women in the least.
Anyhow, she is wrong in all her deductions. I am not in love with Clarissa. It was not with love, when this morning Bellwattle came down the garden with a letter in her hand, it was not with love that I felt a dryness in my throat, or my pulses stopped and, with a sudden impetus, bounded on again.