Hearing this, he gathered everything which came in his way. He was conscious that absorbing thought left him a dull companion, and wished to compensate for it by what small attentions he could offer. As for Millie, he looked at her only to compare her with Anne, and the small fancies which had crossed his mind during the first days they had spent together, had flitted into the unremembered past. He liked her, nevertheless, and recognised a sweetness of nature which, in the years to come, would make a husband happy. Perhaps he even liked her better than at first, when a certain air of alert agreeability had once or twice annoyed him, and pointed to fatigue in companionship. And as she walked in front, what seemed a sudden inspiration struck him. Here was the very wife for Hugh Forbes. He loved liveliness, and her very prettiness was lively; it was, indeed, the very word to use in describing her. And how admirably such an arrangement would fit the puzzle into place! Millie could not understand why he began to talk of Hugh. He grew eloquent. Hugh was the pleasantest fellow! Generous. Lovable. Amusing. Rising. The picture requiring to be toned down slightly, he admitted that he was inclined to be idle; but idleness is a sin a girl readily condones. Millie listened, under the impression that Mr Forbes was talked of that he might think of Anne. The subject was distasteful, but she said heroically—
“How strange she did not like him!” Then, as Wareham laughed, a smile dawned on her face. “Have I said anything odd?”
“No, but I have,” he explained. “I have been trying to make one woman see Hugh’s attractiveness at the very moment when she knew another woman could not bring herself to marry him.”
“That might not have been his fault.”
“Then it was hers?”
Millie felt disposed to cry out at this persistence. The talk had been full of pricks, yet was not without its tremulous pleasure, since she was nearer to Wareham than when indifferent subjects were discussed. He would not have cared to enlist her on Anne’s side, if friendliness had not urged him. She said, after a momentary pause—
“Why not his misfortune?”
He was silent. It would have been difficult to have satisfied him at that instant, and Millie’s suggestion quite failed. He dropped the bitter-sweet topic, and talked of Bakke and the curve of the fjord behind it, promontory overlapping promontory, every light, shadow, and colour reflected in the water. An ugly little church stood near the brink, round it nestled the living and the waiting dead, a few flower-roofed cottages, more black crosses. They stood and looked over the paling; grass waved upon the graves, the same flowery sorrel-tinted grass as scented the air; two or three children were in a boat, the oars splashed, otherwise not a sound broke the silence. Millie’s spirits rose. In the midst of a great nature, she and Wareham seemed to stand alone, to be brought nearer. When she reached her mother, her eyes shone.
Wareham went up the Naerodal alone in the afternoon, but in the dusk all three again strolled together. Clear golden lights swept along sky and fjord; long shadows trembled in the water; two or three ponies scrambled like goats among heaped-up boulders, and the goats themselves, perched on inaccessible heights, sent down faint argumentative bleatings in response to the wild cry with which a girl was coaxing them.
What land is this, in which we have all once wandered? A land of shadows and sweet lights, touching everything with mysterious charm. Hush, dreamer! You know now, though you did not know it then, that this is Arcady.