In this strain they continued until their footsteps led them through the shelter of a group of beeches. And there the gallant captain sought expression in deeds. He kissed her hands, he sought her lips. She resisted softly.
“No,” she said, “only if you love me with all your heart.”
Then suddenly, wonderfully, conqueringly she yielded him her lips.
“Oh!” she sighed presently, “if only you understood.”
And leaving speech at that enigma she kissed again....
But you see now how difficult it was under these mystically loving conditions to introduce the idea of a prompt examination and dispatch of Bealby. Already these days were consecrated....
And then you see Bealby vanished—going seaward....
Even the crash of the caravan disaster did little to change the atmosphere. In spite of a certain energetic quality in the Professor’s direction of the situation—he was a little embittered because his thumb was sprained and his knee bruised rather badly and he had a slight abrasion over one ear and William had bitten his calf—the general disposition was to treat the affair hilariously. Nobody seemed really hurt except William,—the Professor was not so much hurt as annoyed,—and William’s injuries though striking were all superficial, a sprained jaw and grazes and bruises and little things like that; everybody was heartened up to the idea of damages to be paid for; and neither the internal injuries to the caravan nor the hawker’s estimate of his stock-in-trade proved to be as great as one might reasonably have expected. Before sunset the caravan was safely housed in the Winthorpe-Sutbury public house, William had found a congenial corner in the bar parlour, where his account of an inside view of the catastrophe and his views upon Professor Bowles were much appreciated, the hawker had made a bit extra by carting all the luggage to the Redlake Royal Hotel and the caravanners and their menfolk had loitered harmoniously back to this refuge. Madeleine had walked along the road beside Captain Douglas and his motor bicycle, which he had picked up at the now desolate encampment.
“It only remains,” she said, “for that thing to get broken.”
“But I may want it,” he said.