"Well, you see," he temporized, "I'm shy, and I didn't know how else to say it, but I hoped you'd understand."
He let the vague uncommitting words slip slowly from him, as a man pays out a cable which he cannot make fast, with rocks astern of him, and the last fathom at any moment in his fingers. Would she come to his help, he wondered, with a laugh or a light word, or must he go on to the inevitable end.
Lettice said nothing; her glance, lifted from her hand, looked away past him absently across the bay. But in its aversion he read that she understood—more even than he asked; understood that a man may be craven enough to let his eyes do what his lips dare not. She was not coming to his help; but he might, so her silence said, jump overboard and save himself, and let her and his honour go together upon the rocks.
"Well!" he went on in lighter tones, as though to suggest their adoption, "I'm afraid my mute eloquence was wasted. Must I stoop to speech?"
The girl's eyes still gazed dreamily across the water.
"What for?" she said.
She might, as many a woman would, have left his hesitation no alternative; have given with some touch of tenderness, of reluctance, even of acerbity, that hint of the expected from which, for his honour, there could be no appeal. But she chose not to. Perhaps it was her diffidence that decided, perhaps her pride.
Anyway she left to him the freedom of his embarrassment, such as it was.
He must extricate himself, but he himself should choose how. It was clear that he had not chosen when he spoke again.
"You see," he said, with the same airy extenuation; "I'm such a bad talker that I leave as little as possible to my tongue. It is so often, to my thought, like the nervous listener who insists on supplying the last word to a sentence; the wrong word, but the word one has, out of good manners, to use."