"Here?" brightened somebody else.
A window-fastener clicked, a shutter crashed, an aperture opened, and everybody all at once, scenting the sea, crowded to stare out where the gray dusk merging into gray rocks merged in turn with the gray rocks into a low rambling gray fieldstone house silhouetted with indescribable weirdness at the moment against that delicate, pale gold, French-drawing- room sort of sky cluttered so incongruously with the clump of dark clouds.
"The road—doesn't go any farther?" puzzled someone. "There's no other stopping place you mean—just a little bit farther along? This is the end,—the last house,—the——?"
High from a cliff-top somewhere a sea bird lifted a single eerie cry.
"Oh, how—how dramatic!" gasped somebody.
Reaching out to nudge my Husband's hand I collided instead with a dog's cold nose.
Following apparently the same impulse my Husband's hand met the dog's startling nose at almost the same instant.
Except for a second's loss of balance on the bus-step neither of us resented the incident. But it was my Husband who recovered his conversation as well as his balance first.
"Oh, you Miss Davies!" he called blithely into the bus. "What's your Pom's name? Nose-Gay? Skip-a-bout? Cross-Patch? What?—Lucky for you we knew your propensity for arriving with pets! The kennel's all ready and the cat sent away!"
In the nearest shadow of all it was almost as though one heard an ego bristle.