“Fairly well.”
“We’ll get on to the road,” he said; “then we can stop the first tram that overtakes us. It’s too far to walk. We have to study the leg.”
“Oh, that! I played tennis this afternoon,” she said.
He showed his disapproval.
“If you do foolish things like that you deserve complications.”
A tram came up almost immediately. They boarded it; and the girl, feeling a little constrained and disinclined to talk, sat silent, watching the spear of light along the horizon narrowing and paling as the sea settled to a grey restfulness beneath the darkening sky. She did not want Matheson to talk, and was glad when he fell into silence too. She was conscious of the people on the tram to a quite disproportionate degree. She had a persuasion that they knew she was doing something unusual and rather indiscreet. The sense of back doors and secrecy which had gripped her at first had hold of her again, and spoilt things. It was with immeasurable relief that she got down when they reached the terminus and started to walk.
“Let us go on and on,” she said, “until there is no one. I want—quiet.”
“I know,” he said on a note of understanding. “We’ll find what we want.”
A swift and unaccountable feeling of intimacy sprang out of this mutual desire for solitude, which she had expressed with unconscious audacity; while he, in voicing his agreement, seemed to be conspiring with her to get away together and be alone. This purpose had been in his mind from the beginning.
“Tell me when you are tired,” he said, as he helped her over a difficult place.