"I know you would," he assured her with immense conviction. "Of course she can't do the things you do; but she can ride, my word! So she ought to, when she's lived there all her life. The rooms aren't much, but the verandas are what count most; they're better than any rooms. There are two distinct ends to the station—it's like two houses; but of course the barracks were good enough just for me."
She knew about the bachelors' barracks; the annual letter had been really very full; and then she was still out there, cultivating Nelly Potts on a very deep veranda, though her straw hat and straw hair remained in contradictory evidence against a very dirty window on the Middlesex bank of the Thames. It was a shame of the September sun to show the dirt as it was doing; not only was there a great steady pool of sunlight on the unspeakable floor, but a doddering reflection from the river on the disreputable ceiling. Cazalet looked rather desperately from one to the other, and both the calm pool and the rough were broken by shadows, one more impressionistic than the other, of a straw hat over a stack of straw hair, that had not gone out to Australia—yet.
And of course just then a step sounded outside somewhere on some gravel. Confound those caretakers! What were they doing, prowling about?
"I say, Blanchie!" he blurted out. "I do believe you'd like it out there, a sportswoman like you! I believe you'd take to it like a duck to water."
He had floundered to his feet as well. He was standing over her, feeling his way like a great fatuous coward, so some might have thought. But it really looked as though Blanche was not attending to what he did say; yet neither was she watching her little anglers stamped in jet upon a silvery stream, nor even seeing any more of Nelly Potts in the Australian veranda. She had come home from Australia, and come in from the river, and she was watching the open door at the other end of the old schoolroom, listening to those confounded steps coming nearer and nearer—and Cazalet was gazing at her as though he really had said something that deserved an answer.
"Why, Miss Blanche!" cried a voice. "And your old lady-in-waiting figured I should find you flown!"
Hilton Toye was already a landsman and a Londoner from top to toe. He was perfectly dressed—for Bond Street—and his native simplicity of bearing and address placed him as surely and firmly in the present picture. He did not look the least bit out of it. But Cazalet did, in an instant; his old bush clothes changed at once into a merely shabby suit of despicable cut; the romance dropped out of them and their wearer, as he stood like a trussed turkey-cock, and watched a bunch of hothouse flowers presented to the lady with a little gem of a natural, courteous, and yet characteristically racy speech.
To the lady, mark you; for she was one, on the spot; and Cazalet was a man again, and making a mighty effort to behave himself because the hour of boy and girl was over.
"Mr. Cazalet," said Toye, "I guess you want to know what in thunder I'm doing on your tracks so soon. It's hog-luck, sir, because I wanted to see you quite a lot, but I never thought I'd strike you right here. Did you hear the news?"
"No! What?"