“I might have known better,” he said, “and it would be like playing the spy.”
He strode out and went to his engine-house, forcing himself to take an interest in what was going on, and wishing the while that he had not used that glass in so reprehensible a way.
Oddly enough, just at that moment Uncle Luke was seated outside the door of his little cottage in its niche of the cliff below the mine, and wishing for this very glass.
His was a cottage of the roughest construction, which he had bought some years before of an old fisherman; and his seat—he could not afford chairs, he said—was a rough block of granite, upon which he was very fond of sunning himself when the weather was fine.
“I’ve a good mind to go and ask Leslie to lend me his glass,” muttered the old man. “No. He’d only begin asking favours of me. But all that ought to be stopped. Wonder whether George knows. What’s Van Heldre about? As for those two girls, I’ll give them such a talking to—the gipsies! Bah! it’s no business of mine! I’m not going to marry.”
“Yes, let’s sit down,” said Madelaine, turning round. “Oh!”
“What is it? sprained your ankle?”
“No. Mr Pradelle and Harry are close by.”
“Let’s walk on quickly then, and go round back by the fields.”
“But it will be six miles.”