“Teddy will be wondering what has become of me,” she said. “We are playing tennis this afternoon at Mrs Lawless’.”
He stopped also and held the machine for her.
“I should like to see you again before you go,” she added.
“Every evening at about five o’clock I will pass your house,” he replied.
She mounted and rode off, and Lawless, wheeling about, returned to the city, his mind, for all his assertion that he would think no more of what she had said, busy with the picture she had conjured up, a picture which in his larger knowledge of the circumstances struck him as exaggerated and unreal.
Julie overtook Bolitho round the first bend. He had dismounted and was waiting for her at the roadside.
“I told you to go on,” she said, when she came up with him.
“I know,” he answered. “But I preferred to wait.”
She slipped from her saddle to the ground, and, seating herself beside him in the hedge, to the young man’s intense embarrassment, dissolved into tears.
“Oh, don’t, Julie!” he pleaded... “Don’t! I will go on and leave you, if you wish it, dear.”