“Thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid you got rather wet.”
The man laughed, and he had a pleasant laugh. “Oh,” he replied, “I’m used to it.” There was a little silence and he asked: “Isn’t there a village with a hotel in it, a mile or two from here?”
“Yes,” the girl answered, “this is the way. The path goes up to the highroad through the larch wood.”
She turned into the path, and, though she had not expected him to accompany her, the man walked beside her. Still she did not resent it. His manner was deferential, and she liked his face, while there was, after all, no reason why he should stay behind when he was going the same way. He walked beside her silently for several minutes as they went on through the gloom of the larches, where a sweet, resinous odor crept into the still evening air, and then he looked up as they came to a towering pine.
“Have you many of those trees over here?” he asked.
A light dawned upon the girl, for, though he had spoken without a perceptible accent, she had been slightly puzzled by something in his speech and appearance.
“I believe they’re not uncommon. You are an American?”
Wyllard laughed. “No,” he replied. “I was born in Western Canada, but I think I’m as English as you are, in some respects, though I never quite realized it until to-night. It isn’t exactly because my father came from this country, either.”
The girl was astonished at this answer, and still more at the indefinite something in his manner which seemed to indicate that he expected her to understand, as, indeed, she did. Her only dowry had been an expensive education and she remembered that the influence of the isle she lived in had in turn fastened on Saxons, Norsemen, Normans, and made them Englishmen. What was more, so far as she had read, those who had gone out South or Westwards had carried that influence with them, and, under all their surface changes, and sometimes their grievances against the Motherland, were, in the great essentials, wholly English still.
“But,” she remarked at random, “how can you be sure that I’m English?”