“Are you going to drown me?”
“No. Though it’s what you deserve,” he panted briefly. And reaching the boats, he got into the nearest, a solidly built skiff, put Chloris down on the cushioned seat in the stern, pushed the boat off, and paddled her easily with the tide to the shadow of the trees, so that Nouna, if she came to the window, might not see them.
“What do you expect to gain by this astonishing stratagem?” asked Chloris.
“I intend to prevent you seeing Nouna until she has got clear of the house.”
“In the meantime young Wood will have met her, she will have found out that Chloris White is at home, and will have made up her mind to wait until she does see me.”
George made no answer. He was indeed considering what step he should next take. Luckily for him his silence, which was really the result of want of resource, impressed Chloris White differently. She was not used to being thwarted and treated as a person of small account, and she grew impatient and fretful at being made a fool of. To be forced to sit, with a complexion adapted for the half-light of the verandah and the lamps of the dinner table, in the full yellow glare of the evening sun, hatless, with no becoming sunshade to throw a soft shadow over her face, exposed without any of the clever artifices of her treasury to the disillusionised stare of the pleasure-crews that rowed past, was an ordeal which subdued the haughty security of this queen of an artificial realm more surely than innocent George could have guessed. She looked up at him, blinking in the unaccustomed strong daylight, with a malignant expression of spiteful hatred, and then looked over the boat-side into the shallow water, cowering miserably before the combined forces of blunt, coarse, overmastering nature, and blunt, coarse, overmastering man.
“Well, you have got your way this once—make the most of it,” she said bitterly. “Let me get back on the bank; the sun makes my head ache.”
“You will let her go without seeing her?” said George, utterly unconscious in the earnest realities that were occupying him, of the frivolous details which had gained his victory, and suspicious of her good faith.
“Yes, yes, yes, I tell you. She can go and you can go—the sooner the better. I am worn out with your coarse violence; I must go to my room and lie down.”
George paddled slowly back to where there was a pathway among the trees. An inkling of the truth broke upon him as he compared the superb disdain and contemptuous coolness with which this woman had treated him in the verandah with the broken-spirited petulance she showed now. He became rather ashamed of his stratagem, and helped the humbled woman to land very gently, with lowered eyes, feeling for the first time a spark of human kinship with her in this little exhibition of unamiable nature. “I am sorry if I have been rough,” said he humbly. “You see I have been much disturbed to-day.”