But it was before he went to Oxford, while he was yet at school that the change in him became more than that merely of confusion. It was plain to be seen that he avoided her then. A solitary figure, wandering in the Highfield meadow where first they had met, where, most likely it was, they still would meet whenever he was at Yarningdale, showed to Mary the patient heart that watched and waited for him.
Sometimes at Mary's invitation she joined and walked with them. Often it was no more than a shouted greeting from John, flung into the wind over his shoulder, after which the little figure would disappear through the willow trees and for the rest of those holidays perhaps be seen no more, or ever be mentioned by John.
"Have you lost all interest in Lucy?" Mary asked him straightly once when, at the end of his time at Yarningdale, he was packing up his things for the rest of his holiday in Somerset.
He looked up, at first surprised and then with color rising in his cheeks.
"What do you mean by interest?" he asked. "I like her very much. If you mean I haven't seen her these holidays, I can't go hunting her out, can I?"
"Can't you? You used to once."
"Well, I was a kid then. So was she. She's nearly seventeen now."
"Doesn't it all come back to a matter of interest though? You can't be interested, of course, if you're not. I'm not suggesting that you're being willfully unkind to her. I don't think you'd be willfully unkind to any one; but do you know what will happen as soon as you've gone?"
"What?"
"She'll come round here on some pretext. She'll contrive to seek me out and gradually we shall begin to talk about you and then, most cunningly it will seem to herself she is doing it, she'll ask whether you said anything about her while you were here and if you did what it was and how you said it or what I think you meant by it."