“But the darkness?”
“Well, one gets used to that in London. I don’t know that we can talk. Besides, they have a great pull over us in the stars. I assure you that all the men who have said anything about it speak of the winter with evident satisfaction.”
“They know nothing better,” Anne said incredulously.
“The root of all satisfaction,” Wareham observed.
She glanced at him quickly, bit her lip, and walked on. He found himself admiring her tall slender figure, and the poise of her small head thrown into relief by the glassy water. He had dropped the fiction that she was not beautiful, and retreated behind a yet feebler barricade, the pretence that hers was not the beauty he extolled. He had ceased to wonder that it served for Hugh.
At the end of the landing-place Anne turned. Wareham was immediately behind, and she faced him as she had not yet done. She spoke, too, more softly—
“You leave to-morrow?”
He flushed and hesitated.
“I—I am not sure. Possibly.”
Her eyes rested on his for a moment, and moved away. She said, indifferently—“Here is Colonel Martyn.”