Esmé regarded him curiously. It was the man whose seat was next hers at table, the man whose personality had arrested her attention, in whom she felt unaccountably interested. He carried a stick, which he used occasionally to walk with and more frequently to strike with at the grass which bordered the roadside. He carried it as a man carries something from which he derives a sense of companionship. It was all the companionship he ever had upon his walks.
“Good-morning,” the girl said in response to his mute salutation; and added, after a barely perceptible pause: “It is glorious, the air up here.”
“Yes,” he said, and halted irresolutely.
She believed that he resented, not only her speaking to him, but her presence there. He resented neither; but he felt averse from beginning an acquaintance which, once started, it would be impossible to draw back from, and which he foresaw might develop into something of very deep significance. Instinctively he feared this acquaintance. But courtesy demanded some response from him; he made it reluctantly and in a manner which did not encourage her to persevere.
“You are an early riser,” he said. “Usually at this hour I have the day to myself.”
Again it seemed to her that he looked on her presence as an intrusion, that he preferred to take his rambles without the thought of encountering any one. An emotion that was a mixture of impatience and anger seized her at his selfishness.
“There is room for both of us,” she said with a touch of scorn in her voice. “And we travel in opposite directions.”
The man’s features relaxed in a smile, the first she had seen cross his face, an involuntary, whimsical smile. A gleam of understanding lit his eye.
“Yes,” he allowed briefly, and lifted his hat again, and walked on, leaving the girl with the feeling of having suffered a snub.
She looked after him, as he went on, still hitting aimlessly at the grass with his thick stick as he walked, until he rounded the bend and disappeared from her view. Then, dispirited and out of humour with the day, she left the shade of the trees and took her way upward and returned to the hotel.