Ten minutes later G. Selden was walking down Fifth Avenue, wondering if there was any chance of his being arrested by a policeman upon the charge that he was reeling, instead of walking steadily. He hoped he should get back to the hall bedroom safely. Nick Baumgarten and Jem Bolter both “roomed” in the house with him. He could tell them both. It was Jem who had made up the yarn about one of them saving Reuben S. Vanderpoel's life. There had been no life-saving, but the thing had come true.
“But, if it hadn't been for Lord Mount Dunstan,” he said, thinking it over excitedly, “I should never have seen Miss Vanderpoel, and, if it hadn't been for Miss Vanderpoel, I should never have got next to Reuben S. in my life. Both sides of the Atlantic Ocean got busy to do a good turn to Little Willie. Hully gee!”
In his study Mr. Vanderpoel was rereading Betty's letters. He felt that he had gained a certain knowledge of Lord Mount Dunstan.
CHAPTER XXXIX
ON THE MARSHES
THE marshes stretched mellow in the autumn sun, sheep wandered about, nibbling contentedly, or lay down to rest in groups, the sky reflecting itself in the narrow dykes gave a blue colour to the water, a scent of the sea was in the air as one breathed it, flocks of plover rose, now and then, crying softly. Betty, walking with her dog, had passed a heron standing at the edge of a pool.
From her first discovery of them, she had been attracted by the marshes with their English suggestion of the Roman Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out to the sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered as far as eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the plants growing thick at the borders of the strips of water. Its beauty was all its own and curiously aloof from the softly-wooded, undulating world about it. Driving or walking along the high road—the road the Romans had built to London town long centuries ago—on either side of one were meadows, farms, scattered cottages, and hop gardens, but beyond and below stretched the marsh land, golden and grey, and always alluring one by its silence.
“I never pass it without wanting to go to it—to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are. It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of. I want to go and find out what it is.”
This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.