He might have concluded it even more emphatically if he could have followed him, and seen what he saw when he got round the corner where Sally had been left for a moment—only for a moment, mind you, said Jocelyn to himself indignantly,—and found her the centre of an absorbed group.
She was smiling at two men and a woman, who were smiling and talking to her with every appearance of profound and eager interest. She was, in fact, being polite; a habit against which Mr. Pinner had repeatedly warned her, but, for the reason that it wasn’t a habit at all but her natural inability not to return smiles for smiles, had warned her in vain.
These people, climbing up the hill on its other side and finding her standing there alone, had asked her, their faces wreathed in smiles and their eyes wide with astonishment and delight, the way; and she had only politely told them she was a stranger in those parts, and they were only asking her a few kindly questions, to which she had only answered, ‘’Ere on my ’oneymoon,’ and they were only expressing hopes that she would have a good time, when Jocelyn descended, swift, lean and vengeful, on the otherwise harmonious group.
‘Yes?’ said Jocelyn, scowling round at them. ‘Yes?’
‘My ’usband,’ introduced Sally, with a gesture of all-including friendliness.
But it was no use her being friendly. Jocelyn was rude. How not be rude, with those two men standing there staring as if their eyes would bulge right out?
‘I was under the impression,’ he said, glaring at them up and down, from the top of their badly hatted heads, along their under-exercised and over-coated bodies to their unsatisfactory feet, ‘that it was possible in England to leave a lady alone for two minutes without her being subject to annoyance.’
‘I’m sure——’ began the woman of the party, turning very red, while the men looked both scared and sheepish.
‘Don’t mind ‘im,’ said Sally sweetly, desirous of mollifying.
‘On the contrary, I assure you that you had much better—much better,’ declared Jocelyn truculently. And again he pulled Sally’s hand through his arm, and again he hurried her off.