“Nonsense!” exclaimed the young girl, and she tried to laugh.
“But you were telling me that you were not combative—that you always avoided a fight, you know, and that you were so mild, and all that. For a very mild man, Mr. Johnstone, who hates fighting, you are a good ‘man of your hands,’ as they say in the Morte d’Arthur.”
“Oh, I don’t call that a fight!” answered Johnstone, contemptuously. “Why, my collar isn’t even crumpled. As for my hands, if I could find a spring I would wash them, after touching that fellow.”
“That’s the advantage of wearing gloves,” observed Clare, looking at her own.
They were both very young, and though they knew that they had been in great danger they affected perfect indifference about it to each other, after the manner of true Britons. But each admired the other, and Brook was suddenly conscious that he had never known a woman whom, in some ways, he thought so admirable as Clare Bowring, but both felt a singular constraint as they walked homeward.
“Do you know?” Clare began, when they were near Amalfi, “I think we had better say nothing about it to my mother—that is, if you don’t mind.”
“By all means,” answered Brook. “I’m sure I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, and my mother is very nervous—you know—about my going off to walk without her. Oh, not about you—with anybody. You see, I’d been very ill before I came here.”