IV
FLOWERS BY THE WAY
Flora liked this funny little dining-room with walls as frail as box-boards, low-ceiled and flooded with sun. It recalled surroundings she had known later than the mining camp, but long before the great red house. It seemed to her that she fitted here better than the Purdies. She looked across at Kerr, sitting opposite, to see if perhaps he fitted too. But he was foreign, decidedly. He kept about him still the hint of delicate masquerade that she had noticed the night before. Out of doors, alone with her, he had lost it. For a moment he had been absolutely off his guard. And even now he was more off his guard than he had been last night. She was surprised to see him so unstudied, so uncritical, so humorously anecdotal. If she and the major, between them, had dragged him into this against his will he did not show it. She rose from the table with the feeling that in an hour all three of them had become quite old friends of his, though without knowing anything further about him.
"We must do this again," Mrs. Purdie said, as they parted from her in the garden.
"Surely we will," Kerr answered her.
But Flora had the feeling that they never, never would. For him it had been a chance touching on a strange shore.
But at least they were going away together. They would walk together as far as the little car, whose terminal was the edge of the parade-ground. But just outside of the gate he stopped.
"Do you especially like board walks?" he asked.
It was an instant before she took his meaning. Then she laughed. "No. I like green paths."
He waved with his cane. "There is a path yonder, that goes over a bridge, and beyond that a hill."