“I don’t need him, if you won’t laugh at me too cruelly. Besides, do you know that Dick is only three years my senior! Upon my honour, that’s all.”
She made no remark on this, but changed her note to one more serious, and therefore more alarming.
“Your coming with us is certain to revive talk—hush!—and I do not wish that to happen. While you were here with another the fact was not so pointed, but I did not realise that Mr Wareham proposed to leave you altogether on our hands, and I do not like it.”
“He will go,” Hugh said gloomily. He began to see Wareham’s departure in a menacing light. “You know he told you so!”
“Oh, me, me!—Am I his friend? When he gave you wise advice, did he not treat me in the light of a baleful ogress? However, there is no more to be said, for if he will not make so small a concession for you—”
Her tones betrayed annoyance. Hugh’s heart descended to his boots, and he mentally resolved upon another and stronger argument with Wareham.
His path would not be strewn with roses, he began to see; at any rate, if the roses were there, thorns also gave plentiful promise. And he could not understand Wareham, on whom he would have counted for staunch support in these prickly ways. Poor Hugh, whose lights were steady but not brilliant, felt himself unable to comprehend either his friend or Anne. At times she suffered his hope to sail like a kite, straining at its cord, then with a jerk down came the poor flutterer, and dragged helplessly on the ground. Up again, he forgot the downfall, and was as unprepared as ever for disaster.
It was cold, sharply cold, on deck. People began to prepare for sleep. Mrs Martyn betook herself to the ladies cabin; Mrs Ravenhill and Millie stretched themselves on the ground in a small corner at the head of the companion ladder. Anne barricaded herself amongst the small luggage, and warned off Hugh, who wandered round disconsolate.
There was still clear light in the sky, though the horizontal layer of clouds had grown dark, almost black. Black, too, were the low hills which rose on either side of the broad Sogne; here and there a single light gleamed out of the solitude; now and then a bubble of laughter broke from a group on the deck. Hugh went in pursuit of Wareham, and found him in the forepart of the vessel talking to a Norwegian gentleman on the politics which were causing upheaval in the country. When he at last walked away, Wareham remarked to his friend—
“Individually they are a strong nation, but our overgrown world now requires quantity at the back of quality. Besides, they have no young men.”