He looked at her again—steadily—in a way that he had never looked at her before.
“By God I will!” he said, and marched off to meet the man who had come in search of him for the second of the singles.
The man was cross and confounded him properly for a dam skulker. He was, of course, a particular friend of Jack Wingfield’s, or he would have frozen him with politeness.
CHAPTER XII
Priscilla watched him with a considerable amount of interest, for she was far enough away from the crowds at the courts to allow of her watching him without feeling that she was being watched. She saw how he was walking—swiftly—eagerly—a foot or two ahead of the man who had found him—his head slightly bent forward, his fingers clutching the grip of his racket as though he were ready to return with fury the ball that had been served to him with a smash—as if he had made up his mind that the man who sowed the wind (within an indiarubber sphere) should reap the whirlwind—if he could.
He never looked back—that she noticed with the greatest amount of interest. If he had looked back she would have felt that she had not succeeded in her endeavour to force him to take every ounce out of himself. But now she saw that she had been successful.
Was she just too successful? That was a dreadful question which suggested itself to her. Was that the proper spirit in which he should approach his task of getting one step near to the holder of the cup? Would he not have a better chance if he had gone to the court in the tranquil spirit that was usually his—the spirit of Horatio—the man that Fortune’s buffets and awards had ta’en with equal thanks? She knew that the race is not always to the swift, nor the set to the smasher. The eager man with the racket is apt to become racketty and not precise; and she had sent him from her as full of enthusiasm as a schoolboy arriving in London with a sovereign in one pocket and in the other a ticket for the pavilion at the Oval for Surrey v, Sussex, and Ranji 75 not out the previous evening.
For a while she had a grave misgiving. She felt that after all she had misjudged the man. She had never believed that he would be capable of anything like this within half an hour of her beginning to speak to him. She had never believed in sudden conversions—the tours de force of the brilliant evangelist; and she had fancied that it would take her several days, extending over the whole summer, to convince that man that there was something in him. And yet there he was, profane—actually profane in his enthusiasm in less than half an hour!