“‘He took the line of most resistance.’”
Stuart dwelt on her with a slow warm look, more of man in it than he was wont to show. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder:
“Tired?”
She had never yet answered ‘yes’ to this query, and wondered what mood it would arouse in him should she do so. Supposing she were tired? tired of the pilgrimage, of conflict, of the rain beating fresh and cold upon her face....
A few yards ahead stood a little group, consisting of a man, a woman, a perambulator, and two children. The man wore a bowler hat, and the woman a fussy dress of bright blue cloth, obviously reserved for Sunday wear; one child was distinguished from the other by a tippet of dirty imitation ermine. Otherwise they both had sticky mouths, and both were complaining loudly. The man lifted them in turn from the perambulator, and dandled them: “Shall daddy wheel the pram then?” and loud crows of assent.
Seen thus, the man in the bowler had the appearance of one fettered to the texture of a dream, a dream whence all the radiance had been soaked. In the wide spaces of sky and land and rain, the whole turn-out had an inexpressibly dingy look, that caused Stuart and Peter, with an upward rush of spirits, to feel like Hermes and Artemis walking the earth. He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and side by side, untouching, they flashed past the man and the woman and the two children and the perambulator. And Stuart said again: “Tired, Peter?” no longer wishing, as in the first instance, that her answer might be ‘yes.’ “No,” she rang back at him; and they smiled at one another, and swung on.
Towards evening, an unexpected bend of the road brought them home. It was Stuart’s habit to leave Peter at the gate, without jarring by extraneous chatter what they had found of magic in their day. But Miss Esther, anxiously watching for them from beneath a large umbrella, willed otherwise; insisted that Stuart should not depart without his tea, “And you run straight upstairs and get into some dry clothes, Peter, my dear; Mr. Heron will excuse you.”
Rather glumly, Stuart followed his hostess into the dining-room, where tea was informally spread upon the big table. The prevailing atmosphere struck in him the same note of drabness as had the incident of the perambulator. Among these people he was regarded as Peter’s ‘young man,’—well, not quite as bad as that; Peter’s ‘admirer,’ who came to visit her on Sundays, and took her for a walk, and brought her home to tea, and——
“Milk and sugar, Mr. Heron?”