She stopped and held up her face. He laughed and kissed it.
‘Darling,’ he said, kissing her again. Yes; it would have been beastly of him to go off and leave her, to go off and let her wake up and find herself alone.
At the hotel they asked, as Catherine had suggested, for lunch to take with them, and while it was being got ready went out through the heat and hot-house flowers of the glass verandah to the fresh garden glowing and blowing with the blossoms of May. It was a sight, that garden on the cliffs above the sea, jewelled with tulips, frothed with fruit-blossom, and just beyond it, splendidly holding it in with a golden circlet, gorse.
‘It’s much more beautiful here than at our cottage,’ said Catherine, looking about her.
‘How could anything ever be more beautiful than our cottage?’ he answered; and she smiled at him, love in her eyes, and softly slid her hand along his sleeve.
In the garden, reading The Times, was Mr. Jerrold, the eminent editor of the Saturday Judge, who with his daughter Sybil to keep him company had come down from London for a fortnight’s rest and quiet. He had rested now for a whole week, and was beginning to feel that quiet can be overdone. His daughter Sybil had long been aware of it. The hotel was empty—he had hoped it would be when he engaged his rooms, but now thought that perhaps some one else in it might not be wholly disagreeable—and when, on raising his eyes from The Times he saw two visitors emerging from the glass verandah in which he spent his solitary evenings reading among pots of cinerarias, he was glad.
So was his daughter Sybil, who had been down the cliff and up again three times already since breakfast, and was wondering what she could do with the rest of the morning till lunch-time.
Mr. Jerrold watched the new arrivals with deep interest. They would be a great addition to the party, if he and his daughter could properly be described as a party. The young man was a good type of clean, nice-looking young Englishman, public school and university, and would do admirably to play about with poor Billy, thwarted in her desire for prolonged and violent exercise by his inability to take it with her, while he would find the lady, who seemed just about that agreeable age when conversation is preferred to activity, a pleasant companion meanwhile.
He awaited their passing where he and Billy were sitting in basket-chairs under some hawthorns; when they did, he would ask them if they had seen that morning’s Times, and thus open up channels of friendship.