She began to walk slowly, head bent.
‘Well then, to-morrow, or the day after. The place will be just as beautiful, and you even more. The sea-air makes you lovelier from day to day.’
Nancy looked back for an instant. Tarrant followed, and in the deep leafy way he again helped her to pass the briers. But their hands never touched, and the silence was unbroken until they had issued into the open lane.
CHAPTER 6
The lodgings were taken for three weeks, and more than half the time had now elapsed.
Jessica, who declared herself quite well and strong again, though her face did not bear out the assertion, was beginning to talk of matters examinational once more. Notwithstanding protests, she brought forth from their hiding-place sundry arid little manuals and black-covered notebooks; her thoughts were divided between algebraic formulae and Nancy’s relations with Lionel Tarrant. Perhaps because no secret was confided to her, she affected more appetite for the arid little books than she really felt. Nancy would neither speak of examinations, nor give ear when they were talked about; she, whether consciously or not, was making haste to graduate in quite another school.
On the morning after her long walk with Tarrant, she woke before sunrise, and before seven o’clock had left the house. A high wind and hurrying clouds made the weather prospects uncertain. She strayed about the Den, never losing sight for more than a minute or two of the sea-fronting house where Tarrant lived. But no familiar form approached her, and she had to return to breakfast unrewarded for early rising.
Through the day she was restless and silent, kept alone as much as possible, and wore a look which, as the hours went on, darkened from anxiety to ill-humour. She went to bed much earlier than usual.
At eleven next morning, having lingered behind her friends, she found Tarrant in conversation with Mrs. Morgan and Jessica on the pier. His greeting astonished her; it had precisely the gracious formality of a year ago; a word or two about the weather, and he resumed his talk with Miss. Morgan—its subject, the educational value of the classics. Obliged to listen, Nancy suffered an anguish of resentful passion. For a quarter of an hour she kept silence, then saw the young man take leave and saunter away with that air which, in satire, she had formerly styled majestic.