After a minute’s rapturous reflection he turned and noiselessly retraced his steps, till he could descend from the wall without being seen. There was a kind of miniature dry moat surrounding it at this point, and this he lightly vaulted. Then, straightening himself, he strolled forward with as fine an assumption of unsuspecting innocence as he could contrive. It occurred to him to whistle some negligent tune very softly as he came, but, oddly enough, his lips seemed recalcitrant—they made no sound.
At the obtrusion of his shadow upon the map she was examining she looked swiftly up. For a moment, with the afternoon sun in her eyes, she seemed not to recognize him. There followed another pause, infinitesimal in duration, yet crowded with significance, in which she appeared clearly at a loss what to say or do, now that she realized the fact of his presence. Then she smiled at him with a kind of superficial brightness and tossed the map aside.
“I am fortunate indeed to find you,” he said, as he came up, and they shook hands formally. A few moments before, when he had looked down upon her from the mound, he had been buoyantly conscious of his control of the situation; but now that he stood before her it was she who looked down upon him from her vantage-ground on the side of the bank, and somehow this seemed to make a great deal of difference. The sound of his voice in his own ears was unexpectedly solemn and constrained. He felt his deportment to be unpleasantly awkward.
She ignored the implication that he had been looking for her. “I suppose this must be the place that is marked ‘tumulus’ on the map here,” she observed, with what seemed to be a deliberately casual tone. “But I should think it is more like a rath, such as one reads about in Ireland—a fortified place to defend one’s herds and people in. As I understand it, a tumulus was for purposes of burial, and this seems to be a fort rather than a tomb. What is your idea about it?” She rose to her feet as she put the question, and turned to regard the earthworks above and about her with a concentrated interest.
He tried to laugh. “I’m afraid I’m more ignorant about them than anybody else,” he confessed. “I have never been here before. I suppose all one can really say is that the people who did these things knew what they were for, but that since they had no alphabet they could not leave a record to explain them to us, and so we are free to make each his own theory to suit himself.”
“That is a very indolent view to take,” she told him over her shoulder. “Scientists and archaeologists are not contented with that sort of reply. They examine and compare and draw deductions, and get at the meaning of these ancient remains. They do not sit down and fold their hands and say, ‘Unfortunately those people had no alphabet.’ Why don’t you dig this thing up and find out about it?”
He smiled to himself doubtfully, “I have only been in possession of it for about three hours,” he reminded her. Then an inspiration came to, him. “Would you like to dig it up?” he asked, with an effect of eagerness shining through the banter of his tone. “I mean, to superintend the excavations. You shall have forty men out here with picks and shovels to-morrow if you say the word.” Instead of answering, she stooped to get her book and map, and then moved with a preoccupied air to the top of the bank. After an instant’s hesitation he scrambled up to join her.
“I suppose that would have been the entrance there,” she observed, pointing across the circle. “And in the center, you see, where the grass is so thin, there are evidently big stones there. That does suggest interment after all, doesn’t it? Yet the Silurians are said to have buried only in dolmens. It is very curious.”
“I do not find that I care much about Silurians this afternoon,” he ventured to say. There was a gentle hint of reproach in his voice.
“Why, you’re one yourself! That is the principal point about the Torrs; that is what makes them interesting.”